Ivy Tree (19 page)

"All right. You've made your point. You're unscrupulous and I'm not. 'Vantage to you. Now let me go. I'm tired."

"Just a minute. Do you think the blackmail would run to just one kiss?"

"No. I told you this afternoon—"

"Please."

"Con, I've had enough drama for one day. I'm not going to gratify you by struggling in your arms, or whatever. Now let me go, and let's call the scene off."

He didn't. He pulled me nearer to him, saying, in a voice nicely calculated to turn any normal woman's bones to pulp: "Why do we waste our time quarrelling? Don't you know yet that I'm crazy about you? Just crazy?"

"I've gathered," I said drily, "that you've your very own way of showing it, as a rule." His grip slackened. I thought, with satisfaction: that's spoiled your routine, anyway. But it hadn't quite thrown him out of gear. He gave a little laugh that managed to make what I had said an intimate joke between us, and drew me closer once more. His voice sank to a murmur, somewhere near my left ear.

"Your hair looks like melted silver in this light. Sure, and I'm—"

"Oh, Con, don't!" How, short of cruelty, could one get through? I added, a little desperately: "Con, I'm tired—"

Then, even as Con himself had rescued me that afternoon, rescue came. The grey mare, who had been browsing her way, unnoticed, steadily nearer and nearer the gate, suddenly lifted her beautiful head, and thrust it between us, blowing gustily, and still chewing. A froth of grass-stains went blubbering down the front of Con's white shirt.

He swore lamentably, and let me go.

The mare rubbed her head hard against me. Trying not to laugh, I ran a hand up to her forelock, and with the other hand held her gently by the muzzle, keeping her head away from Con. I said, shakily: "Don't be angry! She—she must have been jealous."

He didn't answer. He had taken a pace away from me, to pick up the tools and the coil of wire. I said quickly: "Please don't be angry, Con. I'm sorry I've been a fool tonight, but I was upset." He straightened, and turned. He wasn't looking angry. His face held no expression whatever, as he regarded me and the mare.

"So it appears. But not, apparently, by the horses."

"The—oh, well," I said, pushing die mare's head to one side, and coming away from the gate, "I told you it wasn't that, didn't I? And she's awfully gentle really, isn't she?"

He stood there, looking at me. After a moment or two he said in a curiously dry, abrupt tone: "Well, so long as you know just where you are."

"Oh yes," I said wearily, "I know just where I am."

I turned away and left him standing there in the lane, with die fencing-wire in his hand.

•••

The path to Forrest Hall looked as if nobody had been that way for a hundred years. I don't remember consciously deciding to take it: I only wanted to get away from Con, and not to have to encounter Lisa for a little while longer. I found myself, with no clear idea why I had come this way, walking rapidly away from the house, along the river-path that led towards the Hall. The moss was silent underfoot. To my left, the sliding sparkle of the water lit the way. Big trees edged the path, lining the river-bank. The track was ribbed with the shadows of their trunks, thrown slanting by the moon. Now last year's beech-mast crackled under my feet, and I thought I could smell lime-blossom, until the path led me up to the high wall that girdled Forrest, and there the neglected overgrowth crowded in, with its stronger scents of ivy and rotting wood and wild garlic and elder-flowers. Set deep in the tangle was the gate leading through into the Hall grounds. The elder-bushes, and the ivy cascading over the wall, had almost hidden it from sight. It creaked as I pushed it, and opened crookedly on one hinge.

It was darker in the wood, but here and there, in some chance patch of moonlit sky framed by the branches, burned a star, sparkling blue-white, like frost. The air was still, and the vast trees kept quiet their tangled boughs. The river made all the sound there was.

You could easily have missed the summer-house if you didn't know where it was. It stood a little back from the path, under the trees, and rhododendrons had run wild up the bank in front of it, until its entrance showed only as a gaping square of blackness behind the other shadows. I had gone straight by it when an owl, sweeping past me low down, like the shadow of a flying cloud, startled me into turning. Then I saw the hard edge of the moonlight on the tiles of the roof. A flight of shallow steps, blurred by moss, let up through the bushes.

I paused for a moment, looking at it. Then I left the path, and made my way up the steps, pushing aside the sharp leaves of the rhododendrons. They were as stiff as leather, and smelt bitter and narcotic, of autumn and black water.

The summer-house was one of those once-charming 'follies' built by some eighteenth-century Forrest with a taste for romance. It was a small, square pavilion, open in front, and pillared with slender Ionic columns of peeling plaster. The floor was marble, and round the three sides ran a broad seat. A heavy, rustic-seeming table still stood in the centre of the floor. I touched it with an exploratory finger. It felt dry, but thick with dust, and, I suspected, birds' droppings. In the sunlight of high summer, with the bushes trimmed back, and the view of the river, and cushions on the benches, the place would be charming. Now it was a home not even for ghosts. Pigeons would nest there, and perhaps a blackbird or two, and the owl in the roof. I left it and went down the steps to regain the path.

There I hesitated, half inclined, now, to go back. But the events of the day still pressed on me, and the woods were quiet and fresh. If they were not full of comfort, at least they offered solitude, and a vast indifference.

I would go on, I thought, a little further; as far as the house. The moonlight was strong, and even when the path turned (as it soon did) away from the river, I could see my way fairly easily. Presently the timber thinned again, and the path shook itself free of the engulfing rhododendrons, to skirt a knoll where an enormous cedar climbed, layer upon layer, into the night sky. I came abruptly out of the cedar's shadow into a great open space of moonlight, and there at the other side of it, backed against the far wall of trees, was the house.

The clearing where I stood had been a formal garden, enclosed by artificial banks where azaleas and berberis grew in a wild tangle. Here and there, remains of formal planting could be seen, groups of bushes and small ornamental trees, their roots deep in the rough grass that covered lawns and flower-beds alike. Sheep had grazed the turf down to a close, tufted mat, but underneath this, the formal patterning of path and lawn (traced by their moon-slanted shadows) showed clear. At the* centre of the pattern stood a sundial, knee-deep in a riot of low-growing bushes. At the far side of the garden, a flight of steps mounted between urns and stone balustrading to the terrace of the house.

I paused beside the sundial. The scent of the small, frilled roses came up thick and sweet, and mixed with honeysuckle. The petals were wet, and the dew was heavy on the grass where I stood. The shell of the house gaped. Behind it, the big trees made a horizon, against which the moon sketched in the shapes of the broken walls and windows. One end of the house, still roofed and chimneyed, thrust up looking almost intact, till you saw the forest through the window frames. But they were not there. Nothing,

I crossed the damp, springy grass towards the terrace steps. Somewhere an owl hooted, and a moment later I saw it drift past the blind windows, to be lost in the woods beyond. I hesitated, then slowly climbed the steps. Perhaps it was here that I would find the ghosts...

of the past,

stirred in the empty rooms. Peering in through the long windows, I made out the shapes of yesterday... The drawing-room —a section of charred pannelling, and the wreck of a door, and what remained of a once lovely fireplace. The library, with shelves still ranked against the two standing walls, and a damaged chimney-piece mounted with what looked like a coat of arms. The long dining-room, where a young ash-sapling had thrust its way up between broken floor-boards, and where ferns hung in the cracks of the wall . . . On an upper landing, one tall window had its lancet frames intact, standing sharply against the moonlight. For a moment it seemed as if the leaded tracery was there still, then you could see how the ferns grew in the empty sockets, with a plant of what might in daylight show to be wild campanula, its leaves and tight buds as formal as a design in metal.

No, there was nothing here. I turned away. The weedy gravel made very little sound under my feet. I paused for a moment at the head of the terrace steps, looking back at the dead house. The Fall of the House of Forrest. Con's mocking words came back to me, cruelly, and, hard after them, other words, something once read and long forgotten...

Time hath his revolutions, there must he a period and an end of all temporal things, finis rerum, an end of names and dignities, and whatsoever is terrene, and why not of De Vere? For where is Bohun? Where's Mowbray? Where's Mortimer? Nay, which is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? they are intombed in the urnes and sepulchres of mortality . . .

Magnificent words: far too magnificent for this. This was no noble house ruined, no Bohun or Chandos or Mortimer; only the home of a line of successful merchant-venturers^ with a purchased coat-of-arms that had never led a battle-charge; but they had built something here of beauty and dignity, and cared for it, and now it had gone: and beauty and dignity had gone with it, from a world that was content to let such things run through its fingers like water.

There was a movement from the bushes at the edge of the clearing; the rustle of dead leaves underfoot, the sound of a heavy body pushing through the thicket of shrubs. There was no reason why I should have been frightened, but I jerked round to face it, my heart thudding, and my hand on the stone balustrade grown suddenly rigid . ..

Only a ewe with a fat lamb nearly as big as herself, shoving

her way between the azaleas. She saw me, and stopped dead, head up, with the moon reflecting back from her eyes and from the dew on her clipped fleece. The lamb gave a startled cry that seemed to echo back into the woods and hang there for ever, striking the sounding-board of their emptiness. Then the two of them vanished like clumsy ghosts.

I found that I was shivering. I walked quickly down the steps and across the clearing. As I hurried under the layered blackness of the cedar, my foot struck a cone as solid as a clock-weight, and sent it rolling among the azaleas. A roosting blackbird flew out of die bushes with a clatter of alarm-notes that set every nerve jumping, and jangled on and on through the trees like a bell that has been pulled and left swinging. It brought me up short for the second time. I was just at the entrance to the river-path, where it plunged out of the moonlight into the wood.

I took half a step forward towards those shadows, then paused. I had had my hour of solitude; enough was enough. I had a home of a sort, and it was time I went back to it.

I turned aside to where the main drive entered the clearing, then hurried down its wide avenue, past the banked rhododendrons, past the ruined lodge and the ivy tree, until I reached the painted gate marked WHITESCAR, and the well-kept road beyond it.

Alang the Roman Waal, Alang the Roman Waal,

The Roman ways in bygone days are terrible to recaal.

NORMAN TURNBUIX : Northumbrian Song.

JULIE arrived just before tea on a drowsy afternoon. Everywhere was the smell of hay, and the meadowsweet was frothing out along the ditches. The sound of the distant tractor was as much a part of the hot afternoon as the hum of the bees in the roses. It made the sound of the approaching car unnoticeable, till Lisa looked up from the table where she and I had been slicing and buttering scones for the men's tea, and said: "There's a car just stopped at the gate. It must be Julie." She bit at her lower lip. "I wonder who can be bringing her? She must have got Bill Fenwick to meet her train." I set down my knife rather too carefully. She gave me one of her thoughtful, measuring looks. "I shouldn't worry. This'll be nothing, after the rest."

"I'm not worrying."

She regarded me a moment longer, then nodded, with that little close-lipped smile of hers. In my two-days'

sojourn at Whitescar, Lisa seemed to have got over her odd fit of nerves. Indeed, she had taken my advice to her so much to heart that sometimes I had found myself wondering, but only momentarily, if she really had managed to persuade herself that I was Annabel. At any rate she seemed to have adopted me as genuine; it was a sort of coloration for herself.

"I'll go out and meet her," she said. "Are you coming?"

"I'll let you meet her first. Go ahead."

I followed her down the flagged passage to the back door, and waited there, just in the door's shadow, while she went out into the sunlight.

Julie was at the wheel of an open car, a battered relic almost as old as she was, carefully hand-enamelled a slightly smeared black, and incongruously decorated in dazzling chrome—at least, that was the impression one got—with gadgets of blatant newness and dubious function. Julie dragged ineffectually at the hand-brake, allowing the car to slide to a stop at least four yards further on, then hurled herself out of the door without even troubling to switch off the engine.

"Lisa! What heaven 1 We've had the most sweltering run! Thank God to be here, and I can smell new scones. How's Grandfather? Has she come? My dear, you don't mind Donald, I hope? It's his car and he wouldn't let me drive because he says I'm the world's ghastliest driver, but he had to at the end because I wouldn't get out and open the gates. I asked him to stay —I hope you don't mind? He can have the old nursery and I'll do every stroke of the work myself. Has she come?"

She had on a white blouse, and a blue skirt belted tightly to a slim waist with a big leather belt the colour of new horse-chestnuts. Their simplicity did nothing to disguise the fact that they were expensive. Her hair, which was fair and fine, shone in the sun almost as pale as cotton-floss, and her eyes were grey-green, and very clear, like water. Her face was tanned golden, and her arms and legs, which were bare, showed the same smooth, amber tan. A heavy gold bracelet gave emphasis to one slim wrist. She was holding Lisa's hands, and laughing. She hadn't kissed her, I noticed. The ecstasy of welcome was not personally for Lisa, but was so much a part of Julie's own personality that it sprang, as it were, unbidden. Fountains overflow. If people are near enough, the drops fall on them, sparkling. She dropped Lisa's hands then, and turned, with a swirl of her blue skirt, towards the man whom I now noticed for the first time. He had been shutting the yard gate behind the car. Now, before responding to Julie's hail of "Donald! Come and meet Lisa!" he walked quietly across to where the car stood, with her chrome glittering in the sun as she shook to the vibrations of the engine. He switched the engine off, took out the key, put it carefully into his pocket, and then approached, with a slightly diffident air that was in startling contrast to Julie's ebullience.