Ivy Tree (10 page)

She couldn't understand that any woman could resist for a moment the prospect of an association—any sort of association— with the wonderful, the handsome, the fascinating Connor Winslow. And Con? Well, as far as I could judge, Con thought exactly the same.

Fatted calf or no fatted calf, Annabel's homecoming would certainly be a riot.

Oh, the oak and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree, 

They are all growing so green in the North Country.
 

Traditional.

THE approach to Whitescar was down a narrow gravelled track edged with hawthorns. There was no gate. On the right of the gap where the track left the main road, stood a dilapidated signpost which had once said, Private Road to Forrest Hall. On the left was a new and solid-looking stand for milk-churns, which bore a beautifully-painted legend, WHITESCAR. Between these symbols the lane curled off between its high hawthorns, and out of sight.

I had come an hour too early, and no one Was there to meet the bus. I had only two cases with me, and carrying these I set off down the lane.

Round the first bend there was a quarry, disused now and overgrown, and here, behind a thicket of brambles, I left my cases. They would be safe enough, and could be collected later. Meanwhile I was anxious to make my first reconnaissance alone.

The lane skirted the quarry, leading downhill for perhaps another two hundred yards before the hedges gave way on the one side to a high wall, and on the other—the left—to a fence which allowed a view across the territory that Lisa had been at such pains to picture for me.

I stood, leaning on the top bar of the fence, and looked at the scene below me. Whitescar was about eight miles, as the crow flies, from Bellingham. There the river, meandering down its valley, doubles round leisurely on itself in a great loop, all but enclosing the rolling, well-timbered lands of Forrest Park. At the narrow part of the loop the bends of the river are barely two hundred yards apart, forming a sort of narrow isthmus through which ran the track on which I stood. This was the only road to the Hall, and it divided at the lodge gates for Whitescar and the West Lodge which lay the other side of the park.

The main road, along which my bus had come, lay some way above the level of the river, and the drop past the quarry to the Hall gates was fairly steep. From where I stood you could see the whole near-island laid out below you in the circling arm of the river, with its woods and its water meadows and the chimneys glimpsed among the green.

To the east lay Forrest Hall itself, set in what remained of its once formal gardens and timbered walks, the grounds girdled on two sides by the curving river, and on two by a mile-long wall and a belt of thick trees. Except for a wooded path along the river, the only entrance was through the big pillared gates where the main lodge had stood. This, I knew, had long since been allowed to crumble gently into ruin. I couldn't see it from where I was, but the tracks to Whitescar and West Lodge branched off there, and I could see the latter clearly, cutting across the park from east to west, between the orderly rows of planted conifers. At the distant edge of the river, I caught a glimpse of roofs and chimneys, and the quick glitter of glass that marked the hothouses in the old walled garden that had belonged to the Hall. There, too, lay the stables, and the house called West Lodge, and a footbridge spanning the river to serve a track which climbed through the far trees and across the moors to Nether Shields farm, and, eventually, to Whitescar. The Whitescar property, lying along the river-bank at the very centre of its loops, and stretching back to the junction of the roads at the Hall gates, was like a healthy bite taken out of the circle of Forrest territory. Lying neatly between the Hall and West Lodge, it was screened now from my sight by a rise in the land that only allowed me to see its chimneys, and the tops of the trees.

I left my view-point, and went on down the track, not hurrying. Behind the wall to my right now loomed the Forrest woods, the huge trees full out, except for the late, lacy boughs of ash. The ditch at the wall's foot was frilled with cow-parsley. The wall was in poor repair; I saw a blackbird's nest stuffed into a hole in the coping, and there were tangles of campion and toadflax bunching from gaps between the stones. At the Hall entrance, the lane ended in a kind of cul-de-sac, bounded by three gateways. On the left, a brand-new oak gate guarded the Forestry Commission's fir plantations and the road to West Lodge. To the right lay the pillars of the Hall entrance.

Ahead was a solid, five-barred gate, painted white, with the familiar WHITESCAR blazoning the top bar. Beyond this, the track lifted itself up a gentle rise of pasture, and vanished over a ridge. From here, not even the chimney-tops of Whitescar were visible; only the smooth sunny prospect of green pastures and dry-stone walling sharp with blue shadows, and, in a hollow beyond the rise somewhere, the tops of some tall trees.

But the gateway to the right might have been the entrance to another sort of world. Where the big gates of the Hall should have hung between their massive pillars, there was simply a gap giving on to a driveway, green and mossy, its twin tracks no longer worn by wheels, but matted over by the discs of plaintain and hawkweed, rings of weed spreading and overlapping like the rings that grow and ripple over each other when a handful of gravel is thrown into water. At the edges of the drive the taller weeds began, hedge-parsley and campion, and forget-me-not gone wild, all frothing under the ranks of the rhododendrons, whose flowers showed like pale, symmetrical lamps above their splayed leaves. Overhead hung the shadowy, enormous trees.

There had been a lodge once, tucked deep in the trees beside the gate. A damp, dismal place it must have been to live in; the walls were almost roofless now, and half drifted over with nettles. The chimney-stacks stuck up like bones from a broken limb. All that had survived of the little garden was a rank plantation of rhubarb, and the old blush rambler that ran riot through the gaping windows. There was no legend here of FORREST to guide the visitor. For those wise in the right lores there were some heraldic beasts on top of the pillars, rampant, and holding shields where some carving made cushions under the moss. From the pillars, to either side, stretched the high wall that had once marked the boundaries. This was cracked and crumbling in many places, and the copings were off, but it was still a barrier, save in one place not far from the pillar on the lodge side of the gate. Here a giant oak stood. It had been originally on the inside of the wall, but with the years it had grown and spread, pressing closer and ever closer to the masonry, until its vast flank had bent and finally broken the wall, which here lay in a mere pile of tumbled and weedy stone. But the power of the oak would be its undoing, for the wall had been clothed in ivy, and die ivy had reached for the tree, crept up it, engulfed it, all now the trunk was one towering mass of the dark gleaming leaves, and only the tree's upper branches managed to thrust the young gold leaves of early summer through the strangling curtain. Eventually the ivy would kill it. Already, through the tracery of the ivy-stems, Some of the oak-boughs showed dead, and one great lower limb, long since broken off, had left a gap where rotten wood yawned, in holes deep enough for owls to nest in. I looked up at it for a long time, and then along the neat sunny track that led out of the shadow of the trees towards Whitescar.

Somewhere a ring-dove purred and intoned, and a wood-warbler stuttered into its long trill, and fell silent. I found that I had moved, without realising it, through the gateway, and a yard or two up the drive into the wood. I stood there in the shade, looking out at the wide fields and the cupped valley, and the white-painted gate gleaming in the sun. I realised that I was braced as if for the start of a race, my mouth dry, and the muscles of my throat taut and aching.

I swallowed a couple of times, breathed deeply and slowly to calm myself, repeating the now often-used formula of what was there to go wrong, after all? I was Annabel. I was coming home. I had never been anyone else. All that must be forgotten. Mary Grey need never appear again, except, perhaps, to Con and Lisa. Meanwhile, I would forget her, even in my thoughts. I was Annabel Winslow, coming home. I walked quickly out between the crumbling pillars, and pushed open the white gate. It didn't even creak. It swung quietly open on sleek, well-oiled hinges, and came to behind me with a smooth click that said money.

Well, that was what had brought me, wasn't it? I walked quickly out of the shade of the Forrest trees, and up the sunny track towards Whitescar.

•••

In the bright afternoon stillness the farm looked clean in its orderly whitewash, like a toy. From the top of the rise I could see it all laid out, in plan exactly like the maps that Lisa Dermott had drawn for me so carefully, and led me through in imagination so many times.

The house was long and low, two-storied, with big modern windows cut into the old thick walls. Unlike the rest of the group of buildings, it was not whitewashed, but built of sandstone, green-gold with age. The lichens on the roof showed, even at that distance, like patens of copper laid along the soft blue slates. It faced on to a strip of garden—grass and flower-borders and a lilac tree— whose lower wall edged the river. From the garden, a white wicket-gate gave on a wooden footbridge. The river was fairly wide here, lying under the low, tree-hung cliffs of its further bank with that still gleam that means depth. It reflected the bridge, the trees, and the banked tangles of elder and honeysuckle, in layers of deepening colour as rich as a Flemish painter's palette.

On the nearer side of house and garden lay the farm; a courtyard—even at this distance I could see its clean baked concrete, and the freshness of the paint on doors and gates—surrounded by byres and stables and sheds, with the red roof of the big Dutch barn conspicuous beside the remains of last year's straw stacks, and a dark knot of Scotch pines.

I had been so absorbed in the picture laid out before me, that I hadn't noticed the man approaching, some thirty yards away, until the clang of his nailed boots on the iron of the cattle-grid startled me. He was a burly, middle-aged man in rough farm clothes, and he was staring at me in undisguised interest as he approached. He came at a pace that, without seeming to, carried him over the distance between us at a speed that left me no time to think at all.

I did have time to wonder briefly if my venture alone into the Winslow den was going to prove my undoing, but at least there was no possibility now of turning tail. It was with a sense of having the issue taken out of my hands that I saw the red face split into a beaming smile, and heard him say, in a broad country voice: "Why, Miss Annabel!"

There was the ruddy face, the blue eyes, the huge forearm bared to the elbow, and marked with the scar where the bull had caught him. Bates, head cattleman at Whitescar. You'll {now him straight away, Con had said. But I didn't venture the name. The lessons of the past three weeks still hummed in my head like a hive of bees: Take it slowly. Don't rush your fences. Never be too sure.... And here was the first fence. Tell the truth wherever possible. I told it. I said with genuine pleasure: "You knew me! How wonderful! It makes me feel as if I were really coming home!" I put out both hands and he took them as if the gesture, from me, was a natural one. His grip nearly lifted me from the ground. The merle collie running at his heels circled round us, lifting a lip and sniffing the back of my legs in a disconcerting manner.

"Knew you?" His voice was gruff with pleasure. "That I did, the minute you come over the top there. Even if Miss Dermott hadn't tell't us you were coming, I'd 'a known you a mile off across the field, lass!

We're all uncommon glad to have you back, and that's a fact."

"It's marvellous to be here. How are you? You look fine, I don't think you can be a day older! Not eight years, anyway!"

"I'm grand, and Mrs. Bates, too. You'd know I married Betsy, now? They'd tell you, maybe? Aye . . . Well, she's in a rare taking with your coming home, spent all morning baking and turning the place upside down, and Miss Dermott along with her. You'll likely find there's tea-cakes and singin' hinnies for your tea."

"Singin' hinnies?"

"Nay, don't tell me you've forgotten! That I'll not believe. You used to tease for them every day when you was a bairn."

"No, I hadn't forgotten. It was just—hearing the name again. So—so like home." I swallowed. "How sweet of her to remember. I'm longing to see her again. How's Grandfather, Mr. Bates?"

"Why, he's champion, for his age. He's always well enough, mind you, in the dry weather; it's the damp that gets at his back. It's arthritis—you knew that? and there's times when he can hardly get about at all. And now they say there's this other trouble forby. But you'll have heard about that, too, likely? Miss Dermott said you'd telephoned yesterday and asked them to break it gentle-like to your Granda. They’d tell you all the news?"

"Yes. I—I didn't quite know what to do. I thought of writing, but then I thought, if I telephoned Con, it might be easier. Miss Dermott answered; the others were out, and, well—we had a long talk. She told me how things were, and she said she'd get Con to break it to Grandfather. I hadn't known about Grandfather's stroke, so it's just as well I didn't just write to him out of the blue. And anyway, I wouldn't have dared just walk right in here and give everyone a shock."

His voice was rough. "There's not many dies of that sort of shock, Miss Annabel."

"That's ... sweet of you. Well, Miss Dermott told me quite a lot of the news.. .. I'm glad Grandfather keeps so well on the whole."

"Aye, he's well enough." A quick glance under puckered eyelids. "Reckon you'll see a change, though."

"I'm afraid I probably shall. It's been a long time."

"It has that. It was a poor day's work you did, Miss Annabel, when you left us."

"I know," I said. "Don't blame me too much."

"I've no call to blame you, lass. I know naught about it, but that you and your Granda fell out," He grinned, softly. "I know what he's like, none better, I've known him these thirty years. I never take no notice of him, rain or shine, and him and me gets on, but you're too like your dad to sit still and hold your tongue. Winslows is all the same, I reckon. Maybe if you'd been a mite older, you'd 'a known his bark was always worse than his bite, but you were nobbut a bit lass at the time, and I reckon you'd troubles of your own, at that." A short, breathless pause. "Troubles—of my own?"