Sibyl's Warning

Sibyl Vantreux knocked before she came into the library, at seven on Saturday morning, which was the first time in twelve days that anybody in that house had knocked on a door instead of finding out whether it would let them.

She had not been to bed. Nell read it off her the way she read a room: Friday’s grey dress, the collar wanting a pin, a candle still lit in her hand in a corridor that had daylight in it.

“You are up,” Sibyl said.

“Since four. There’s forty pages of guild engagement on that table and I’ve been through them eleven times looking for a fourth way out. There’s three, and I don’t like any of them.”

“Then we shall not waste each other’s morning.” Sibyl set the candle on the reading table and blew it out, and the smell of it went round the cold room. “I am going to say a thing I have not said aloud in eleven months, and I should be obliged if you would let me get to the end of it before you are clever at me.”

“Go on, then.”

“I know that it is Héloïse.”

Nell put the pencil down.

“I have known since the twentieth of November,” Sibyl said. “I was in that cupboard four hours. Bess was on the other side of it with her hands going, and I heard her, and I heard Joan, and I heard Mrs Pardoe send down to the yard for a bar, and none of it made the least difference to that door. And then I heard my sister-in-law come along the landing and stop, and the door opened, and she had not touched it, and she was six feet off, and I came out into the passage and looked at her face.” She folded her hands. “She was not surprised, Miss Hartigan. She was appalled. Those are different, and I have spent eleven months telling the county the first one.”

“You gave the inspector the six feet.”

“I gave the inspector what I had written down, because I am not a liar and I have a good hand and I keep a dated book.” Sibyl’s chin went up an eighth of an inch. “I did not give him what I thought. There is a difference between those two, and I have been living inside it since November, and I find it is a smaller room than the linen cupboard.”

Nell got up and put a shovel of coal on a dead grate, because she wanted her back to the woman for four seconds.

“You want it done.”

“I want it out of her.”

“It can’t be got out of her. Not the way you mean.” Nell turned round. “There’s one procedure and it doesn’t ask what it’s taking. It finds what’s working in a house and it takes it out, root and residue, and it cannot tell a wound from a weapon, ma’am, because nobody ever built it to be asked. Whatever held that door on you is the same lump of her that has kept her upright in this house for thirteen years, and there is no instrument in England that can go in and pick out the one and leave the other.”

Sibyl was quiet for a moment.

“Then it will take the weapon,” she said, “and I have thought about that a great deal in the night, and I find I can live with it.”

“You’ll not be the one living with it.”

“No,” said Sibyl. “That is the other thing I have been thinking about.” She picked up the dead candle out of habit, looked at it, and set it down again. “I have one more thing and then you may have your morning back. You are a guild woman with four years owing on a bond, and on Monday afternoon you will write what you write and get into a chaise. I have watched you twelve days and you are not a fraud and you are not a fool, which is inconvenient of you. Do not let her think you are the rest of her life. She has been alone eighteen months and she has had exactly one person in that time speak to her in an ordinary voice, and a woman in that condition will mistake it for weather.”

“That’s your warning about me,” Nell said. “You’ve a second one and you’d sooner give it to her than to me, and you’ve been stood in that doorway since seven working out how.”

Sibyl went out without answering, which was an answer.

· · ·Scene break

The drawing-room fire was lit at four o’clock, because Joan had laid the match at four o’clock every day of her working life and nobody had yet told her not to, and at ten past four Sibyl came in with the letter-case under her arm and the Harrogate letter on the top of it.

Héloïse was at the window with the music from the study under her hand. She had carried it about the house for two days the way another woman carries a shawl.

“Héloïse. The letter wants signing.”

“Leave it on the table, please. I shall read it this evening.”

“It has been on the table since Thursday.”

“Yes,” Héloïse said. “I know where it has been.”

Nell stood up to go, because it was the decent thing and her case was already in her hand, and Héloïse said, without turning round, “Miss Hartigan, will you stay?” — and Nell sat down again on the arm of the chair and put the case between her boots and felt the whole shape of the next quarter of an hour arrive in the room and settle in it.

Sibyl set the letter-case down.

“Very well,” she said. “Then I shall say it in front of her, which is where you want it said, and we shall all three of us know where we are.

“You have had a guild officer in this house twelve days and on Monday she goes, and the county will still be here, and I shall still be here, and you will still be a widow of thirty-five with an income under a trust and not one man in the riding obliged to speak for you. I have written to your cousins twice. I have declined four callers since August. I have answered every letter that came into this house because you would not answer them, and I have fed you, because you do not eat, and I have gone to church at your elbow every Sunday for eighteen months so that four hundred people should see that somebody of your husband’s blood is willing to sit next to you. You may call that management. I am told the word is in use in this house lately.”

“You may sit down, if you would rather.”

“I would not rather.” Sibyl looked into the fire. “And now the other half, since Miss Hartigan is stopping. On the twentieth of November you shut me in the linen room for four hours. Not a ghost. Not my brother. Not the house, which I have heard called a great many kind things by people who do not have to sleep in it. You. I should like it said in this room, in your own voice, and I have wanted it said for eleven months, and I have been too much of a coward to ask while I still had somewhere else to put it.”

The fire ticked. Nell had the resonance glass in her coat pocket with the stopper out and the base of it against her hip through the lining, because she had put it there at half past three without admitting what for. It went over and back against her side, small and regular and unhurried, and it had not altered since the door opened.

Héloïse laid the music down on the window seat.

“Yes,” she said.

“Say the whole of it.”

“It was mine. Whatever held that door came out of me, and it happened on the morning you went through my wardrobe with Joan and sent three of my dresses to be cut down and dyed without telling me, and I did not know that was the reason until a fortnight ago.” She said it clearly, without heat, all the way to the end. “I shall not tell you it was an accident, because I cannot prove it, and I shall not tell you it was not me, because that is a lie you could sit down to dinner with and I have stopped serving those. It was me. I am sorry. That is the whole of it and there is no more of it coming.”

Sibyl stood very still.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I have not finished.” Héloïse’s hands were at her sides and the thumb was nowhere near the palm. “From this evening I answer my own letters. All of them, including the ones you believe I am not strong enough for, and I shall answer the Harrogate letter tonight, and the answer will be no. I receive whom I choose, on whatever day of the week I choose, and if Mrs Oldroyd comes again she is to be shown in. And you will never again, in this house or in any drawing room between here and Ambry, tell anybody that I am not strong. Not to spare me. Not to spare yourself. That is three things. I counted them this morning because I knew I should lose my nerve in the middle of them.”

“And if I will not?”

“Then you will not,” Héloïse said, “and I shall be sorry, and it will still be three things.”

Sibyl picked up the letter-case.

“I came into this house nine years before you did and I learned it off the same man,” she said, “and you have just told me that everything I have done since the funeral is a thing that was done to you.” She reached the door and stopped. “I shall go to Harrogate. I shall write to my cousins tonight, with my own hand, since you have taken the others off me, and I shall go on Tuesday, or on Monday if the carrier will take boxes at that hour.”

“Sibyl.”

“And on Monday, when your inspector comes, I shall tell him the truth. All of it. The six feet, and the ladder, and what I have known since November, and I shall do it without being asked.” Her voice did not rise. It never rose; that was the trouble with it. “I am not doing it to punish you. I am doing it because I have sat in the smaller room eleven months and I will not sit in it any longer, and because I believe it will save your life, and because you have just proved to me that you can say a true thing out loud when it costs you something, and I do not propose to be worse than you in my own brother’s house.”

She went out. The door did what a door does.

· · ·Scene break

Nell let a minute go by before she said anything, because a minute is what people want and nobody in that house had been allowed one in a fortnight.

“Nothing happened,” she said.

Héloïse did not turn round. “I beg your pardon?”

“In that quarter of an hour. Nothing happened. No door, no cold, no candlestick off a shelf, and I had the glass in my pocket the whole while and it never came off sixty-two.” Nell took it out and held it up, and they both looked at it going over and back, the way it had gone in a linen cupboard on Friday and on a staircase at half past one in the morning nine nights before. “That’s not luck. That’s the rule of the thing. It comes up instead of you. You were there. You stood in your own drawing room and said it out loud in your own voice, and there was nothing left over for it to do.”

“That is a technical answer.”

“Aye. It’s the best sort I have.”

Héloïse laughed, one breath of it, badly, and put the back of her hand against her mouth.

“She will tell him,” she said.

“She will. And it’ll matter less than you think by the time she does, and I’d not spend tonight on it.”

“Because your report is already in his keeping.”

“Because my report is already in his keeping,” Nell said, “and because she is going to Harrogate, and because you have just taken your correspondence, your callers and your appetite back off a woman who has held them eighteen months, and if you spend tonight on the inspector you will not notice that you did it.”

Héloïse crossed the room and sat down at the piano.

She did not put the lid up. She sat on the stool in the ordinary way with her feet under her and laid both hands flat on the closed lid, where the wood had gone warm from six feet of firelight, and stayed there, and the maker’s gilt lettering ran along under her fingers.

Nell stood at the hearth and made herself not cross the carpet, which by the twelfth day she had a good deal of practice in.

“Eleven years,” Héloïse said at last. “I have sat beside her in a pew every Sunday for eighteen months and never once thanked her for it, because I believed she did it to be seen doing it. She did. And she also did it. I have got rather better at holding two of those at a time lately.” She took her hands off the lid. “Thirteen years of being arranged for kindly, and I have just sent away the last of them, and I want to be accurate with you about what I feel, because you have never once let me be inaccurate. It is not relief.”

“What is it?”

“It is the linen room,” Héloïse said. “From the inside. With the door standing open and nobody holding it.”

“That’ll pass off.”

“Will it?”

“I’ve not the first idea,” said Nell. “I’ve never done it. I’ve been paying a guild two hundred pounds’ worth of my life for nine years and I’ve never once said three things straight out to anybody and let them walk off with it, and if you want an honest answer, that is the one there is.”

Héloïse looked at her a long moment, across the warm end of a cold room, on the twelfth evening, with two days of a fortnight left and nothing whatever in either of their hands.

“Then we are neither of us qualified,” she said. “How very restful.”