A Judgement in Stone Read Free Page B

Smith was preaching on a cottage doorstep. Melinda Coverdale, in her room in Galwich, was struggling to make sense out of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
. Giles Mont was reciting mantras as an aid to meditation.
    But already they were gathered together. In that moment when Jacqueline declined to make a phone call, an invisible thread lassoed each of them, bound them one to another, related them more closely than blood.

3
    George and Jacqueline were discreet people and they didn’t broadcast their coming good fortune. But Jacqueline did mention it to her friend Lady Royston, who mentioned it to Mrs. Cairne when the eternal subject of getting someone to keep the place clean came up. The news seeped through along the ramifications of Higgses, Meadowses, Baalhams, and Newsteads, and in the Blue Boar it succeeded as the major topic of conversation the latest excesses of Joan Smith.
    Eva Baalham hastened, in her oblique way, to let Jacqueline know that she knew. “You going to give her telly?”
    “Give whom—er—television?” said Jacqueline, flushing.
    “Her as is coming from London. Because if you are I can as like get you a set cheap from my cousin Meadows as has the electric shop in Gosbury. Fell off the back of a lorry, I reckon, but ask no questions and you’ll get no lies.”
    “Thank you so much,” said Jacqueline, more than a little annoyed. “As a matter of fact, we’re buying a colour set for ourselves and Miss Parchman will be having our old one.”
    “Parchman,” said Eva, spitting on a windowpane before giving it a wipe with her apron. “Would that be a London name, I wonder?”
    “I really don’t know, Mrs. Baalham. When you’ve finished whatever you’re doing to that window, perhaps you’d be good enough to come upstairs with me and we’ll start getting her room ready.”
    “I reckon,” said Eva in her broad East Anglian whine. Shenever called Jacqueline madam, it wouldn’t have crossed her mind. In her eyes, the only difference between herself and the Coverdales was one of money. In other respects she was their superior since they were newcomers, and not even gentry but in trade, while her yeomen ancestors had lived in Greeving for five hundred years. Nor did she envy them their money. She had quite enough of her own and she preferred her council house to Lowfield Hall, great big barn of a place, must cost a packet keeping that warm. She didn’t like Jacqueline, who was mutton dressed as lamb and who gave herself some mighty airs for the wife of the owner of a tin can factory. All that will-you-be-so-good and thank-you-so-much nonsense. Wonder how she’ll get on with this Parchman? Wonder how I will? Still, I reckon I can always leave. There’s Mrs. Jameson-Kerr begging me to come on her bended knees and she’ll pay sixty pence an hour.
    “God help her legs,” said Eva, mounting the stairs.
    At the top of the house a warren of poky attics had long since been converted into two large bedrooms and a bathroom. From their windows could be seen one of the finest pastoral views in East Anglia. Constable, of course, had painted it, sitting on the banks of the river Beal, and as was sometimes his way he had shifted a few church towers the better to suit his composition. It was lovely enough with the church towers in their proper places, a wide serene view of meadows and little woods in all the delicious varied greens of early May.
    “Have her bed in here, will she?” said Eva, ambling into the bigger and sunnier of the bedrooms.
    “No, she won’t.” Jacqueline could see that Eva was preparing to line herself up as secretary, as it were, of the downtrodden domestic servants’ union. “I want that room for when my husband’s grandchildren come to stay.”
    “You’ll have to make her comfortable if you want her to stop.” Eva opened a window. “Lovely day. Going to be a hot summer. The Lord is on our side, as my cousin as has the farm always says. There’s young Giles going off in