The doctor’s wife wasn’t a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.
‘What will you do, then?“ she asked him.
Mrs. Maudsley was an exceedingly attractive woman. She had large brown eyes with long lashes that curled prettily, and her dark hair that had not a trace of gray in it was pulled back in a style of such simplicity that only a true beauty would not be made plain by it. When she moved, her form had a rounded, womanly grace.
‘And what do you say?“ asked Dr. Maudsley of the third man. Wilfred Bonner, standing to one side, had, until now, remained silent.
The doctor knew his wife was beautiful, but they had been married too long for it to make any difference to him.
‘Very little.“
All three men looked gravely at their shoes.
Mr. Bonner took his cap off and drew in a slow, whistling breath. “Well, I’m no medical man, but it seems to me them girls is not right.” He accompanied his words with a look full of significance, then, in case he hadn’t got his message across, tapped his bald head, once, twice, three times.
‘They’re running wild,“ the younger Fred Jameson said finally.
Mrs. Maudsley was shaken entirely out of her reverie by it. On hearing the yowl, she stared at the piano in disbelief and stood up, her hands to her cheeks. In her bewilderment she had only the barest moment to register that she was not alone.
‘Out of control,“ added the older Fred Jameson.
On my last day Miss Winter told me about Dr. and Mrs. Maudsley.
‘Surely not!“
The sound that resounded in the room was the harshest, most un-pianolike noise imaginable. This was in part because the piano had been neglected, unplayed and untuned, for many years. It was also because the vibration of the instrument’s strings was instantly accompanied by another noise, equally unmelodic. It was a kind of a howling hiss, an irritated, wild sort of a screech, like that of a cat whose tail has got under your feet.
And the men left. They had done their bit. It was up to the doctor, the village elder, now.
‘I’m sure you are right,“ he murmured with a vagueness that meant he was sure she was wrong. He had given up trying to get her to believe only what was true; she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good.
Mrs. Maudsley didn’t like what she saw at all. She frowned at the half-closed curtains, and sighed at the tarnished silver, and shook her head in amazement at the saucepans on the stairs and the sheet music that was scattered all over the floor of the hallway. In the drawing room, she bent down automatically to retrieve a playing card, the three of spades, that was lying dropped or discarded in the middle of the floor, but when she looked around the room for the rest of the pack, she was at a loss, so great was the disorder. Glancing helplessly back at the card she became aware of the dust covering it and, being a fastidious, white-gloved woman, was overwhelmed with the desire to put it down, only where? For a few seconds she was paralyzed with anxiety, torn between the desire to end the contact between her pristine glove and the dusty, faintly sticky playing card, and her own unwillingness to put the card down in a place that wasn’t the right one. Eventually, with a perceptible shudder of the shoulders, she placed it on the arm of the leather armchair and walked with relief out of the room.
Mrs. Maudsley nodded, which was her way of disagreeing with her husband, though he didn’t know it. “What about the mother? What do you know of her?”
And so three days later Mrs. Maudsley arrived at the house and knocked at the front door. Astonished to get no answer, she frowned— after all, she had sent a note to say she was coming—and walked round to the back. The kitchen door was ajar, so with a quick knock she went in. No one was there. Mrs. Maudsley looked around. Three apples on the table, brown and wrinkled and starting to collapse upon themselves, black dishcloth next to a sink piled high with dirty plates, and the window so filthy that inside you could hardly tell day from night. Her linty white nose sniffed the air. It told her everything she needed to know. She pursed her lips, set her shoulders, took a tight grip on the tortoiseshell handle of her bag and set off on her crusade. She went from room to room looking for Isabelle, but on the way taking in the squalor, the mess, the unkemptness that lurked everywhere.
What was going on in her mind as she sat there on the piano stool, staring into space? These were people who couldn’t keep their flower vases topped up. No wonder their children were misbehaving! The extent of the problem seemed suddenly to have been revealed to her through the dead flowers, and it was in a distracted, absent fashion that she pulled off her gloves and spread her fingers on the black and gray keys of the piano.
The doctor was a man of science. Though he knew it was statistically unlikely that there was any mental abnormality in the twins, he could not rule it out until he had seen them. It did not surprise him, though, that his wife, whose religion forbade her to believe ill of any-me, would take for granted that the rumor was ill-founded gossip.
Though he’d said he would speak to the family, what the doctor actually did was speak to his wife.
‘Leave it with me,“ said the doctor. ”I’ll speak to the family.“
Mrs. Maudsley seemed to slump down onto the piano stool.
Dr. Maudsley was not young, yet though he was in his middle forties he gave the impression of youth. He was not tall, nor really very muscular, but he had an air of vitality, of vigor about him. His legs were long for his body and he used to stride along at a great pace, with no apparent effort. He could walk faster than anyone, had grown used to finding himself talking into thin air and turning to find his walking companion scurrying along a few yards behind his back, panting with the effort of keeping up. This physical energy was matched by a great mental liveliness. You could hear the power of his brain in his voice, which was quiet but quick, with a facility for finding the right words for the right person at the right time. You could see it in his eyes: dark brown and very shiny, like a bird’s eyes, observant, intent, with strong, neat eyebrows above.
The library seemed better. It was dusty, certainly, and the carpet was threadbare, but the books themselves were in their places, which was something. Yet even in the library, just when she was preparing herself to believe that there remained some small feeling for order buried in this filthy, chaotic family, she came across a makeshift bed. Tucked into a dark corner between two sets of shelves, it was just a flea-ridden blanket and a filthy pillow, and at first she took it for a cat’s bed. Then, looking again, she spotted the corner of a book visible beneath the pillow. She drew it out. It was Jane Eyre.
She shook her head in wonderment. “He is afraid of them because hey are twins. Poor Wilfred. It is just old-fashioned ignorance. Thank goodness the younger generation is more understanding.”
‘Go and see the family. Charles Angelfield is a bit of a hermit, but he’ll have to see me if I go.“
‘They think in the village that the girls are mentally retarded.“
From the library she passed to the music room, where she found the same disorder she had seen elsewhere. The furniture was arranged bizarrely, as though to facilitate the playing of hide-and-seek. A chaise lounge was turned to face a wall, a chair was half hidden by a chest that had been dragged from its place under the window—there was a broad sweep of carpet behind it where the dust was less thick and the green color showed through more distinctly. On the piano, a vase contained blackened, brittle stems, and around it a neat circle of papery petals like ashes. Mrs. Maudsley reached her hand toward one and picked it up; it crumbled, leaving a nasty yellow-gray stain between her white-gloved fingers.
Leaving gates open and wandering into other people’s houses was one thing, walking off with a baby in its pram was quite another. The fact that the baby, when it was found, was discovered to be none the worse for its temporary disappearance was beside the point. Things had got out of hand; action was called for.
‘I doubt they meant any harm by it,“ she said, when he had finished telling the story. ”You know what girls are. A baby is so much more fun to play with than a doll. They wouldn’t have hurt him. Still, they must be told not to do it again. Poor Mary.“ And she lifted her eyes from her sewing and turned her face to her husband.
And the doctor continued to think in silence, and Mrs. Maudsley continued her sewing, and after a quarter of an hour had passed, the doctor said, “Perhaps you might go, Theodora? The mother might sooner see another woman than a man. What do you say?”
There, rising from the chaise lounge, a slight figure in white—
The Missus tired easily, and she couldn’t manage the stairs very well, and her sight was going, and she often thought she had cleaned things when she hadn’t, or meant to clean them and then forgot, and to be honest, she knew nobody really cared, so she mostly concentrated on feeding the girls, and they were lucky she managed that much. So the house was dirty, and it was dusty, and when a picture was knocked wonky it stayed wonky for a decade, and when one day Charlie couldn’t find the paper bin in his study, he just dropped the paper onto the floor in the place where the paper bin used to be, and it soon occurred to him that it was less fuss to chuck it out once a year than to do it once a week.
The villagers didn’t feel able to approach Charlie directly about it. They understood that things were strange at the house, and they were half afraid to go there. Whether it was Charlie or Isabelle or the ghost that encouraged them to keep their distance is hard to say. Instead, they approached Dr. Maudsley. This was not the doctor whose failure to arrive promptly may or may not have caused the death in childbirth of Isabelle’s mother, but a new man who had served the village for eight or nine years at this time.
Dr. Maudsley had a great love of intellectual activity. Illness was a kind of puzzle to him, and he couldn’t rest until he’d solved it. Patients got used to him turning up at their houses first thing in the morning when he’d spent the night puzzling over their symptoms, to ask one more question. And once he’d worked out a diagnosis, then there was the treatment to resolve. He consulted the books, of course, was fully cognizant of all the usual treatments, but he had an original mind that kept coming back to something as simple as a sore throat from a different angle, constantly casting about for the tiny fragment of knowledge that would enable him not only to get rid of the sore throat but to understand the phenomenon of the sore throat in an entirely new light. Energetic, intelligent and amiable, he was an exceptionally good doctor and a better than average man. Though, like all men, he had his blind spot.
The delegation of village men included the baby’s father, his grandfather and the publican, a weary-looking fellow who didn’t like to be left out of anything. Dr. Maudsley welcomed the trio and listened attentively as two of the three men recounted their tale. They began with the gates left open, went on to the vexed issue of the missing saucepans and arrived after some minutes at the climax of their story: the kidnapping of the infant in the perambulator.
Maudsley had a knack of spreading his energy around him—that’s no bad thing for a doctor. His step on the path, his knock at the door, and his patients would start feeling better already. And not least, they liked him. He was a tonic in himself, that’s what people said. It made a difference to him whether his patients lived or died, and when they lived, which was nearly always, it mattered how well they lived.
‘It’s what Wilfred Bonner thinks, at least.“
