The House on the Fen Read online

  CLAIRE RAYNER

  The House On the Fen

  Claire’s sixth novel; from 1967.

  e-book ISBN 978-1-84982-038-7

  Published in e-book by M P Publishing Limited 2011.

  M P Publishing Limited,

  12 Strathallan Crescent

  Douglas, Isle of Man,

  IM2 4NR, British Isles

  Copyright © 1967 Claire Rayner

  Copyright © 2011 M P Publishing Limited

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Rayner, Claire / House on the fen, The

  A novel in 13 chapters

  e-book— SGH; 2011-12-06

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  About this book

  No one had seen her leave. Numbed by the inexplicable events of the evening, Harriet Darnell found herself running down the dark path away from the bleak mansion she hated, away from the cruel husband she feared. There was no time to question, no time to plan. She was free for the first time in her life, free perhaps for ever…

  Soon she was away from the house, away from the town, on a train bound for London. But no one— not her husband, nor the townspeople, nor even the conductor who collected train tickets — no one had seen her leave…

  About the author:

  Claire Rayner was a Londoner born and bred, though she spent three years in Canada, supporting herself in a variety of odd jobs: waitress, summer stock, jewellery saleswoman, untrained aide in the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children. She trained at the Royal Northern Hospital, Holloway, and has worked at Guy’s, the Royal Free, and at the Whittington Hospital, Highgate in the Children’s Unit. She was awarded the hospital Gold Medal for outstanding achievement.

  She married an advertising executive, [Des], and with the birth of their first child — they had three — she reluctantly gave up nursing. By that time, however, she had begun to write. She has published innumerable articles, a book for adults titled MOTHERS AND MIDWIVES, and a non-fiction account for children of WHAT HAPPENS IN HOSPITAL. She has broadcast, both on sound and television, and has been active in Youth Clubs.

  Claire Rayner has written several books under the pseudonym, Shiela Brandon; these have now been e-published by MPP under her own name: include Doctors of Downlands, The Final Year, the Cottage Hospital.

  Thanks from MPP to Gloria Knecht, Maria Smith, and especially to Des Rayner.

  Claire Rayner died in 2010, in her eightieth year; she is survived by her husband, Des, her three children Amanda, Adam and Jay, and four grand-children.

  Contents

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  The House on the Fen

  a novel by

  Claire Rayner

  Chapter One

  She woke suddenly. There was no gentle abandonment of the rags of sleep, no gradual awareness of self. One moment she was deep in oblivion, and then there was the dim square of the window against the dusk, the noisy ticking of the clock, the cold heaviness of one arm crushed beneath her, the thick taste in her mouth that meant she had slept with her head back and her jaw lax. She closed her eyes again, almost in a panic, trying to slide back into the safe darkness, but a sense of foreboding pulled her clumsily to her feet.

  She reached for the lamp switch on the small table beside her armchair and the window became a velvety black as the room sprang into light. As she rubbed her hand against the rough cloth of her skirt, trying to stop the painful pins and needles of returning sensation, she peered around the room, at the heavy wooden wall panels, the dying fire in the wide stone hearth, the solid furniture, trying to orientate herself, seeking the source of her anxiety.

  This is home, she told herself, home. My home. Nothing to be frightened of, here. Just stone-walls-indeed-a-prison-make—. But she pushed that thought away, the un-homeliness of this house she had lived in for five years. That was all too familiar. That thought made her only dully miserable, not frightened.

  It was the clock that crystallised her fear. A quarter to six. As she stared at it, memory and panic rose in her.

  Oh, God, he’ll be furious. The train was due in at five thirty-five. He’ll be standing on the platform, his shoulders hunched in that pale overcoat of his, his face rigid with anger because I’m not there. And there’ll be the whole evening to get through, and he won’t talk to me, just sit and stare into the fire, and when we have to go to bed, he’ll—. Oh, God, he’ll be furious.

  She was moving now, shrugging into her thick, tweed coat, running her hands over her ruffled hair, hunting through her pockets for her car keys. And then she remembered, and her fear changed, became a thick dull hopelessness, an awareness of the impossibility of ever doing the right thing, ever behaving as Jeffrey wanted her to.

  The car was still at the garage. Andersen had promised it would be ready by four, and she had meant to be there in time to pick it up, in time to meet Jeffrey’s train. She pulled the big front door open with her head down, went out into the dark wetness of the February evening, hurrying down the path, slithering a little on the rotting remains of last autumn’s leaves as her still sleep-sodden legs refused to obey her properly.

  It took ten minutes of half-running, half-trotting along the dank straight road, with the flat fields of the fens disappearing into the darkness on each side, and the heavy, almost tangible, smell of the marshes and the sea in her nostrils. The garage was at the crossroads, and when she saw the darkness of the little clump of buildings, her last faint hope died in her. Andersen had locked up, gone the two miles home to the village and his tea.

  Please God, she prayed, please God let him have left the car out for me.

  But of course he hadn’t. There was no little white car there, only an elderly bicycle propped up against the locked door of the workshop.

  She stood for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Go home again, phone the station, tell Jeffrey what had happened, ask him to see if Andersen would turn out the village’s only taxi for him? And if she did that, he would shout at her over the phone, say horrible things, not thinking of who might hear him. That Joe Potter, the ticket collector-cum-porter-cum-everything else would be listening with a grin on his flat Saxon face, storing it all up for gossip in Thaxham-on-the-Fen’s only pub later on. She couldn’t do that.

  The bicycle. She would borrow the bicycle. Andersen wouldn’t mind, not if she brought it back. She would meet Jeffrey, try to soothe him and then go for the taxi herself.

  As she pedalled, head down against the bitter cold of the wind hissing over the marshes, she tried to think.

  Why? Why could she never do the right thing in her dealings with Jeffrey? She had long ago given up trying to love him, telling herself that love was a romantic myth, that Harriet Darnell had no right to expect it. But she wanted to be a good wife, wanted to please this man she had married. And she couldn’t
. He despised her, treated her as a useless creature, even making her feel, on those rare occasions when he made love to her, that he was doing so just because she was there in his bed. Faute de mieux, she thought miserably. For want of a better. Was it because of that that their marriage has soured so early? The way she had shrunk from him at the beginning, hadn’t known how to behave in bed?

  But that didn’t bear thinking about again either. She couldn’t let memory bring back the cruel things he had said to her, the way he had sneered at her, left her weeping hopelessly when he stormed out of the house to find comfort elsewhere. Better to try to think what had gone wrong today. Why had she slept so heavily, so that she had been too late to meet his train? She tried to remember.

  Mrs. Joel had stayed late over her cleaning, overriding Harriet’s weak attempts to tell her not to bother, that there was no need to fuss over the housework. And before she had left— at half past three, wasn’t it— yes, at half past three, she had brought the surprised Harriet a tray of tea. A rare piece of friendliness from the dour Mrs. Joel, who had worked for Jeffrey long before Harriet had married him, and had never seemed to like her employer’s wife. For there was no doubt that it was Jeffrey she worked for, not Harriet. Harriet hadn’t wanted help in the house. She had little enough to do to fill her empty days, in all conscience, but her suggestion that Mrs. Joel should go had enraged Jeffrey, and she had given in, frightened of his temper.

  Anyway, she remembered, watching the headlight from the bicycle wobbling on the road in front of her, she had drunk the tea, sitting there in the armchair, glad of something that would keep her mind away from Jeffrey’s return from one of his frequent trips to France. And she must have fallen asleep. Odd, that. She would have thought her anxiety would have kept her awake.

  She made a wry face in the darkness. Freudian perhaps, escaping from reality into sleep. If this past five years had given her nothing else, they had given her time to read, and last year she had read her way stolidly through Freud and Jung and Melanie Klein, in a vain effort to find out why she was the sort of person she was.

  As the first houses of the village slid past her, and she could see the lights of the tiny station ahead, one small memory came back, overriding the sharp rise of fear in her as her meeting with Jeffrey came close. When she had awaked, something had been at the back of her mind. What had wakened her? A bell—yes, that was it. A bell. The telephone? If it had been that, it must have stopped before she really woke. But who would telephone her, anyway? She knew few people in the village, her shyness making her seem unfriendly, so who would telephone? Had it been Jeffrey, angry because she wasn’t waiting for him? But it was no use thinking about it now.

  She propped the bicycle against the side of the little newspaper kiosk Andersen’s son used each morning, when the few people who worked outside the village left for Ipswich and Cambridge and London, and forcing herself to move in a relaxed way, crossed the slatted wooden floor toward the barrier. There was no one there, no sign of Joe Potter, and the small window of the ticket office was shuttered. He too had gone home for his tea; there would be no more to do at the station until the last train, the seven forty-five for London, came in.

  There was no sign of Jeffrey either. She went down the wooden stairs, her heels clattering in the silence, to peer along the platform, eerie in its dimness, only two or three lights burning to illuminate the station name plates and the shabby advertisements on the peeling hoardings.

  The rails gleamed, black satin ribbons disappearing into the darkness, reflecting the distant red and green of signal lights up the line, but there was only silence.

  She looked for him, carefully, going into the tiny waiting room with its stuffy cold smell of tobacco and sick children, even banging on the door of the men’s lavatory at the end of the platform, but there was no one.

  Oh, well, she thought, as she went back to the bicycle. It’s past mending. I should have gone home when I saw the car wasn’t there, but it’s past mending. I’ll just have to go home now, and let him say what he likes.

  In an odd way, she enjoyed the journey back. She enjoyed the smell of the marshes, the bite of the wind on her face, the tug of her muscles as she pushed the heavy pedals around, aware of her body, consciously using physical sensation to keep her from thinking her mouse-on-a-wheel thoughts. And as she propped the bicycle back against the workshop door at the garage, taking pernickety care to leave it exactly as she had found it, the shreds of her will, of her sense of humour, came bubbling up.

  You’re a fool, she told herself. You know that, Harriet Darnell? A double-dyed, spineless, half-witted, useless bloody fool. You let Jeffrey treat you as he does. You behave like a mongrel bitch, going whining to him for every whipping, dragging you tail against the ground, positively asking for more. What would Freud say about that? Would he tell you to leave him, or tell you that you enjoyed being a doormat? Dogs and doormats—lovely mixed metaphors. Darnell the Doggy Doormat, Delighting in Degradation.

  As she walked back along the road toward the house, she played with words, making strings of alliterative sentences. But when she pushed the gate open, she was pulled sharply back to the reality of the present.

  There was a light burning behind the long upstairs window, the one that let thin shafts of daylight stream in over the staircase. And in the light of the window, she could see against the side of the house, on the roughly paved drive, the car. It stood there, dully white, and she went over to it, opened the door, to stare at the key in the ignition. Only the ignition key. The other keys that were usually attached to the ring were gone, the front door key, the back door one.

  She giggled almost hysterically in the darkness as she shut the car door again and ran her hand over the bonnet, feeling the warmth of the recently used engine. What’s he doing for God’s sake? Did he get the car himself from the garage? He knew it had to be serviced, knew it would be there. And why take my other keys? Is he going to lock me out? No such luck. Not pretend-to-be-respectable Jeffrey Darnell. What would people say if he locked his wife out of her home? That would be much worse than what they probably already said about his visits to Mrs. Joel’s daughter—.

  She tried to push the front door open, wondering if, in a country fashion, he had left it unlocked, but it resisted.

  She was getting irritated now. Irritated with herself mainly, because of the way her fear was still with her, irritated because the hellish moment when they would have to face each other was constantly being put off. She knocked sharply, with a vigour born of her rising temper.

  She could hear nothing, and she knocked again, louder. And this time, she heard footsteps, loud and then muffled, as someone walked over the rugs in the living room, on to the parquet, on to the rug in the hall. The bolt clattered. Bolted? She thought. Ye Gods, but this time he’s really in a rage— and then the door moved open.

  In the split second as the door swung, she decided. I’ll just be gay, relaxed and not apologetic—.

  She moved forward as the door opened fully, fixing a smile on her face.

  “Jeffrey— isn’t it absurd? I fell asleep—”

  But he moved so that she couldn’t go in, and she fell back a step, staring up at him.

  She couldn’t see him properly. The light in the upstairs hallway was still burning, and over his shoulder she could see the flames of the newly mended fire leaping cheerfully against the panelling. But his face was in deep shadow, his body outlined in a nimbus of light. She could just see that he was wearing his silk dressing gown, with a scarf in the neck, an outfit she privately called his Noel Coward costume. On his forty-year-old bulk, it made him look absurd, though she had never dared tell him so.

  “Jeffrey?” she said again. “I fell asleep—that was why I missed the train—.”

  “Who is it?” his voice sounded rough. “What do you want?” She shook her head, as though to clear it, as though she were dazed, puzzled by the tone of his voice.

  “It’s me—Harriet,” she said
. “Let me in, please, Jeffrey. I know you’re annoyed, but I can explain—.”

  You’re apologizing, part of her mind jeered at her. Apologizing. So much for gay insouciance—.

  He started to push the door against her.

  “You’re mad,” he said flatly. “I’ve never seen you before in my life. Who do you say you are?”

  “Harriet—” she said stupidly. “I’m Harriet— your wife, Jeffrey—.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, his voice still flat, no hint of emotion in it. “My wife is here—.”

  “Jeffrey, for God’s sake—” she began, and then there was a movement at the top of the stairs, and she stared over his shoulder, up toward the faint sound.

  “Who is it, darling?”

  It was like a film that had been abruptly stopped in midreel, Harriet thought wildly, staring upward. She and Jeffrey, and the woman at the top of the stairs, her shape silhouetted against the light. And then they all moved slightly, the woman coming down a step, so that, like Jeffrey, her face was deeply shadowed, without definition.

  She’s wearing my blue housecoat, Harriet thought stupidly. The one I bought last Christmas. She’s wearing my housecoat, and it fits her—.

  “Who is it darling?” the woman said again, leaning against the banisters in such a comfortable fashion that it looked as though she had lived in the house all her life, knew every inch of it as intimately as her own body.

  “I don’t know—” Jeffrey began to close the door again, and this time Harriet was too bemused to resist, and let it click shut in her face. But she could still hear his voice beyond it.

  “Some mad creature or other— it’s not important—. Look, will you be long Harriet? Shall I make the coffee?”

  “Mmm—do—” the voice of the woman came muffled. “I shan’t be a moment—” and then Jeffrey’s footsteps went heavily along the hall.