A Disturbing Influence Read Online Free PDF Page B

felt that I was a great failure if so loyal and dutiful a girl as Lindy remained a pagan at heart. The Christian values were no more than a superficial veneer on the life of Cartersfield.
    Isobel’s fever remained high for several days, and for some time she was on the danger list, though she raved about other things after I had told her that I had sacked Lindy and seen her mother. Altogether it was an awful summer. Whenever I saw Lindy or Mrs Badham or Johnson I felt obliged to cross the road. To my intense irritation Johnson would sometimes touch his cap as he passed. I employed a new girl to look after the house, but she was most unsatisfactory.
    Suddenly, in October, our months of prayer were answered. The nights were chilly, but we had a succession of perfectly lovely days, hazy but warm, and England suddenly seemed unbearably beautiful again, as it so often does after one has given up all hope. The by-pass was finished. Johnson went home to the north, or to another job and another Lindy—I did not inquire which, though I suspect the latter. Isobel came home again, and got so much better that she could laugh about herself raving that she was going to die. But she was going to die. It was cancer without any doubt now, and though it was kept from her I think she knew it herself. I would find her standing abstractedly in the middle of a room, lost in thought, or going round the house touching various objects, and I could easily guess what she was thinking.
    One day she brought me tea in my study and said: ‘Guess who I met in the street.’
    ‘Evangeline?’
    ‘No. Lindy Badham. I was thinking that perhaps it would be right to take her back now that that man has gone.’
    ‘But, Isobel, you objected so strongly.’
    ‘I know I did, dear, and I was right in a way. But one shouldn’t remain unforgiving. Does she have any kind of job at the moment?’
    ‘I really don’t know.’
    ‘She needs one. She’s going to have a baby.’
    ‘No!’ I was really shocked.
    ‘She’ll need the money while she can get it, dear.’
    So we took Lindy back again, though she showed as little emotion at being taken back into the fold as she had at being dismissed from it. But I drew the line at taking her back into the choir. It seemed to me that it was hardly setting an example to have a girl pregnant with an illegitimate child working in a vicar’s house, and really carrying charitableness too far. But I wished to give Isobel what I could in her last months, and I made the sacrifice of principle without a whisper from my conscience, though with several heated words from Miss Spurgeon. It gave me not a little pleasure to irritate that old maid.
    One day I asked Lindy why she had been so careless.
    ‘Careless?’ she said.
    ‘In having a child.’
    ‘I wanted to have one,’ she said, looking as ugly and blank as ever. There didn’t seem to be anything at all for me to say.
    After Christmas Isobel hardly ever left her bed. In February Lindy’s child was born. It was the usual healthy bawling creature that Cartersfield girls produce, a boy, and called William Johnson. It was with some difficulty that I persuaded Lindy not to call him simply Bill. Against a good many principles I christened him in March. Isobel urged it. She even became rather fond of the baby, making Lindy bring it with her in the mornings, for she was soon back at work with us. It was one of Isobel’s last wishes. She died shortly after Easter.
    The end, so long expected, came as a release for her, as people say, but it was a great blow to me. Isobel had stood with me for over twenty years, and I grieved for her for many months. My personal loss was combined with a great sense of failure, a failure of which the presence of Lindy’s baby in my own house was symbolic. For some time I confined myself to routine work and reading, a pleasure I had denied myself for many years. I lived mostly in my study. One of my few solaces, curiously, was hearing the gurgles