Fantails (9 page)

John nodded, his face radiant. “There
might
be tadpoles!”

“Not at this time of year, dear. Tadpoles come in spring,” said Lucia repressively. She was annoyed that Hugh evidently intended to go out alone with John.

“There won’t be tadpoles, but there may be minnows. We’ll have a look, and if there are, we’ll go to-morrow with a jam-jar and a net and see if we can catch some,” Hugh said.

“You won’t forget we go to beddy-ba at six?” Lucia reminded him. “It’s so important that we stick to our routine, isn’t it?”

“Routine times have to change, though, as a child grows older. And these long light evenings are the best part of the summer. It’ll do John no harm to stay up till half-past six or even seven. He only lies awake threshing around,” said Hugh.

“Threshing around,” John echoed him, “an’ playing. Mary at the Swan gave me a little tin. I filled it up with spit, but it had all run out by morning.”

“And there’s my bath,” said Lucia. “I have it before dinner, after I’ve put John to bed.”

“I’ll put him to bed if we come in later than six.” Hugh wasn’t going to have Lucia dictating to him, least of all where John was concerned. She had done harm enough to Melanie.

“Oh, very well!” Lucia’s voice was huffy. Then, remembering that she would be well advised to tread warily with her brother-in-law until she had established herself here on a permanent basis, she changed her tune.

“Daddy knows best what’s good for little boys, doesn’t he, John? Hugh, while you’re out, how would it be for me to have a little talk with Mrs. MacNeish, to see if I can help her with the housekeeping in any way? I’d be so glad to take the little household bothers off your shoulders!”

Hugh thanked her, but said firmly that there was no need for her to trouble. Mrs. MacNeish was thoroughly capable, and if she did have any household bothers she had sense enough to deal with them herself. “Ready, John?” The tall man and the small boy went out together through the long french windows.

Hugh thought of Melanie as they crossed the lawn towards a door in the wall that opened on the river bank. She would have been a link between himself and John: a link they needed now that they were going to see more of one another. In London John’s nursery meals, his own return home too late to do more than say good night to a small figure in a dressing-gown already on his way to bed, had kept them from being much together. And now this feeling of his, that all the best of life was left behind, that he was old and tired at forty-three, was not going to be a helpful factor in the relations that he hoped to bring about with John. Useless to tell himself it was absurd to feel so at his age. He knew too well that age was not a matter of the years, but of the spirit. He had known men and women who at seventy were full of zest for living and others who in their twenties had already lost it.

“Whom the Gods love die young ... The Gods, then, had loved Melanie surpassing well. When she had died five years ago she had been thirty, yet had seemed no more than a child in her teens, with all a child’s carefree inconsequence. Always she had relied on him to make decisions, had been reluctant to assume the least responsibility, had shrunk from planning for the future, turned her face from difficulties. This was due to all the years when Lucia had possessed her, shielded her from trouble, guarded her from worry, blocked every path that might have led to her development along lines not planned for her by her managing elder sister.

His love for her had been the love one gives a charming, trustful child, cherishing and protective, and in return Melanie had given him her adoring hero-worship. He had never allowed himself the disloyalty of wondering whether that adoration would grow into the companionship and understanding of maturer womanhood, nor had he known their friends had likened them to David Copperfield and his Dora.

John had been following a swallow’s flight. He said, “I wonder how far it would be to heaven?”

Hugh came back to the present. “I don’t think anybody knows that.”

“If someone was to die it would be a good idea to tie an inch tape to his foot, so then we’d know.”

Hugh was spared having to answer this by Lucia calling after them. “Hugh! Telephone! A call from Norwich!”

“Wait for me; old boy. I’ll be as quick as I can,” he said, and went with long strides back to the house.

John looked about consideringly. At the far end of the garden was a screen of bushes beyond a fence. He wondered what they hid. Maybe he could look through that little gate.

Alison was feeding the hens when they flew up about her in a squawking cloud. She looked about to see what had startled them, and saw a rather alarmed-looking little boy who had clambered on the gate and now was hanging over it. “I didn’t mean to frighten them!” he said.

“Of course you didn’t. Look, they’ve all begun to eat again. Silly things, hens!”

“I’ve never known a hen, exactly.”

“Would you like to help to feed them?”

He nodded vehemently, slipped down off the gate, struggled with the latch, then, solemn and radiant, tiptoed to her side, anxious to cause no more commotion.
“What do I have to do?” he whispered.

Alison held her bowl of com for him. “Just throw a handful down for them.”

The scattered hens came clustering round again as he threw down the com with the action of an underarm bowler, frowning anxiously. He beamed as they began to eat. “I did it all right, didn’t I?”

“Splendidly.” Alison was filled with tenderness for his small pale face, the endearing way his hair grew in a drake’s tail in the nape of his neck. “Would you like to see our kittens?” she suggested, to be answered again by his silent, vehement nod. The kittens were by now able to scamper unsteadily about the stable. They sat staring with surprised blue eyes in one of the hen’s nesting-boxes at the first small boy they had seen. One was black, the other striped grey and silver. John said nothing. He squatted by them, staring in silent ecstasy, oblivious to the voice that called him in the garden. “John! Hi! John! Where have you disappeared to?”

Alison left the small rapt figure and went out, and through the little gate to meet a tall man who must be Dr. Brandon. Her first impressions were of distinction, strength, intelligence; her next, of loneliness, a withdrawn austerity of the spirit that was to her a trifle daunting.

Hugh saw a girl rather below normal height, with round face, friendly brown eyes, smooth brown hair, and a diffident manner. She said, “If you’re looking for a small boy in a blue shirt, he’s brooding over two kittens in our stable, in such a state of bliss I hadn’t the heart to tear him away when you called.” He liked her voice, low-pitched and gentle and unhurried. His brow, that had been puckered, cleared.

“Oh, good! I was beginning to wonder if he’d found some way through to the river on his own. My name is Brandon, as you’ve probably suspected.”

“I had indeed. In Market Blyburgh we know all about a newcomer long before we set eyes on him. More about him than he knows himself, I sometimes think! I’m Alison Hamilton. I live up there”—she gestured to the windows over the coach-house—“with my young cousins.”

“The Sinclairs told me a great deal about you all. I was sorry not to meet you that evening you came to Swan House for coffee, but as you probably know, Tom and I had to dash off in a hurry to an accident. John and I are on our way to inspect the river.”

“I advise you to collect him, then! Otherwise he’ll spend the night in the stable. He can see and hear and think of nothing at the moment but kittens.” Laughing, they turned together towards the yard.

John was still crouched where Alison had left him. He scrambled up and clutched his father’s hand. “The black one pats your finger if you wiggle it! His nails go in an’ out of his feet! The other one’s more shyer, but he tries to catch his tail!”

Hugh stayed for a few minutes admiring the kittens, then suggested that they should go on to the river. John rose reluctantly, torn between two delights. “Do
you
know if there’s any little fishes in the river? Fishes we could catch and have in a jam-jar?” he asked Alison.

“Lots of them. There’s a shallow pool where catching them is easy. Have you got a net?”

“No ...” John looked up uncertainly at Hugh.

“We thought we’d find the fish first, then see about a net to-morrow,” Hugh told Alison.

“To-morrow’s such a long way off. We have one somewhere, and plenty of jars. If you’ll wait half a minute I’ll get them.”

Three minutes later she rejoined them, flushed and breathless, bringing a couple of glass jars and a muslin net on a long stick. “Shall I come with you to show you where the best pool is?” she suggested, not wanting to intrude, but thinking that Hugh, in his dark suit, looked as though he might have lost his boyhood’s skill at catching minnows.

“Oooo—
yes!”
John cried.

Hugh laughed. “No doubt about that answer! It’s most awfully good of you. But can you spare the time?”

They could have boiled eggs for supper instead of the vegetable curry she had planned ... Alison answered that she had plenty of time. “At five years old it can be a major tragedy to go out fishing and catch nothing,” she said, as John went scampering ahead of them across the lawn. “Childhood isn’t invariably the blissful state that it’s supposed to be by sentimentalists!”

“No. Fortunately we’re more apt to remember the pantomimes and picnics than the time we hatched out measles the day before our birthday party.”

“Or the times it rained just as we were starting for the picnic.”

“Or the pangs of calf-love,” Hugh capped her. Alison stole a sidelong glance at him, thinking that it was difficult to associate anyone so aloof and poised with knowledge of calf-love and its pangs.

She led them up the river to a small shallow backwater, shaded by willows. At their approach a shoal of tiny fish darted for cover to the weeds that grew, a miniature submerged forest, on one side of the pool. Alison told John, “We’ll have to wait till they come out again, and then I’ll show you the best way of catching them.” Then she exclaimed apologetically to Hugh: “I’m sorry—how interfering of me! I’ll go back now and leave you to it.”

But he protested that she must stay. “You can’t desert us at the crucial moment. I’ve forgotten all the technique I used to have.” So she stayed on with them until a half dozen minnows were swimming in each jam-jar. Then while John, having seen a baby water-rat, wandered off along the bank in search of more, she sat with Hugh under the willows, unaware of how much she was revealing of herself as she answered his casual questions about the neighbourhood, and her young cousins, and told of local birds, legends, and folk-lore.

John slid his hand confidingly in hers as they retraced their steps down the river bank. “We’ve had a happy time, haven’t we? Do you know some more nice places?”

“Lots! I know where two swans are bringing up four young ones and a place where foxes have a litter every year.”

“What’s a litter?”

“A family of cubs. Baby foxes.”

His eyes were round with wonder. “Oh! ... Will you take me an’ Daddy there?”

“I’ll take you—but I don’t know if your father would want to bother.” Over her shoulder she looked back at Hugh questioningly, half smiling.

“Indeed I should, if I can spare the time.” He was recapturing old memories, memories that had been half buried by the years in college, hospital wards, consulting-room. Echoes of forgotten sounds chimed in his ears, the haunting odours of the riverside were once more fragrant in his nostrils. He paused when they were back by the door in the wall, sketching a gesture that embraced the river and the marshland beyond. “I had almost forgotten the magic of this sort of thing.”

Alison stood beside him, looking at the sliding water. “You could never quite forget. The river spell is far too strong to let one go completely once it’s caught one.” Looking down at her he asked, “You’re still aware of it, in spite of living beside it?”

“Oh
yes.
Living would lose more than half its savour if one ceased to be aware of all the little lovely things that make its pattern—” She broke off as the door behind her opened and Jane came through.

“Alison! I thought I heard your voice—” her face between its two long swinging plaits was vivid and excited.

Alison said, “This is Jane, my youngest cousin, Dr. Brandon.”

Jane held out a slender hand, smiling at Hugh shyly. “I’m sorry if I wasn’t polite, but I was in a hurry to get Alison!” She turned to her cousin, seizing her hand. “I thought you’d
never
come! Logie’s got some terribly exciting news and she won’t breathe a word of it till you’re there too.
Do
hurry—she says we’ll both be simply thrilled!”

“I’ll come this very moment. Good night, Dr. Brandon. Good night, John!”

“You won’t forget about the swans and baby foxes, will you?” John asked anxiously.

“Of course I won’t. Next time you come to see the kittens we’ll arrange it.”

“When can I come?”

Over her shoulder she called back, “Whenever you like. To-morrow—any time!”

“Run!” Jane implored her. “I’ve been enduring agonies of curiosity for such ages!”

“Half an hour at least!” Alison teased her. Nevertheless she ran as she was bidden, urged on by hope.

Supposing—just
supposing
...

Hugh Brandon watched the pair till they were out of sight.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hand in hand, Alison and Jane tumbled up the stairs in the old coach-house. Laughing and breathless they burst into Fantails. Logie, who had been watching from the window, ran to meet them.

“Alison, I thought you’d
never
come!” she cried reproachfully. “To find you out to-day of all days, when I wanted you so
specially
!” Her shining hair was ruffled, cheeks flushed, eyes bright as stars. Seizing her sister and cousin, she swung them round in a gay, whirling dance, singing her own words to the tune of “You should see me dance the polka”: