The Girl Green as Elderflower (3 page)

A mincing cock-pheasant examined the holes his Wellingtons had made, and suddenly, as if acting on information, a swarm of sparrows and blackbirds came to do the same. The light changed. In the sky which had been lowering there were patches of a tender summery blue.

The Hole Farm, generations of Clares had called that narrow valley. Their farmhouse lay, hidden by trees, near the source of the stream which had formed it. To their descendant, transient tenant of the tied cottage, the honest old yokel name had always seemed picturesque as sneezewort or fleabane. But the Clares had long ago left the yokel life, and their successors in the farmhouse by the stream gave an address more dignified than The Hole.

Two ponies which had been standing under an oak came with careful steps, as if the snow hid traps, to see what was in his pockets. Their rough hides, chestnut and bay, glowed in that light, organic as a blush. He had nothing to share with them but his warmth, which they seemed to savour. One of them belonged to Lucy.

He closed the gate on the farm and went up a noiseless white lane towards the village, emerging near the church. On the footpath between the headstones there was not a mark. Once again he noted the spikiness of the churchyard greenery, in which yew, holly and mahonia predominated, all in this weather formidable as ironmongery.

By the further gate he passed Crispin Clare of The Hole Farm. Some memory of that stone, accidentally prominent, must have led Major Clare to give his son the same name. The siting of a footpath had brought the old farmer and malster fame, and to his great-great-great-grandson Swainsteadian visitors at Martlets would say: ‘Not
Crispin
Clare?’ ‘Ah, him that live up the boonyard,’ young Mark Clare would mumble, in the dialect he affected. ‘That old booy that creep out at midnight and suck Mikey’s blood.’ At that Mikey would shriek: ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, Marco,’ delighted. He knew about vampires from television, and toyed with his mysterious cousin, suddenly materialized out of the world at large, like Cleopatra exploring the possibilities of the asp.

There was a twinkling weatherfastness about Swainstead in the snow. Since the late Middle Ages, when it had prospered on the trade in woollens, it had been a substantial village, almost a town, and its substantial houses suggested no want of anything comfortable, ever. After the Clares had left the soil for the law and other professions, a solicitor among them who had thrived announced the fact by buying the house he most admired in his native place. Martlets was not grand, but it had about it the weight and confidence of money, with another quality which money could buy, a high-handed stance towards time. Cloth had built it in the fifteenth century, as cloth had built so many great churches in the countryside around, and although it had sprouted a wing since then, the old clothier might still have recognized his rooms. To Clare at the age of nine it had seemed a rather dull museum, reprehensibly cold. But to his father, son of a poor colonial clergyman and lately reappeared from having a good war, it was clear that young Crissie ought to wander a little in his own boyhood haunts, and in that determination he was strengthened by the chance of the boy’s being on the mother’s side, too, a son of the house. For Mrs Clare, though as unmetropolitan as a solar topee, had been a Melford; and the Melford arms, bought in the seventeenth century with the profits from their excellent cloth, gave Martlets its name. So, on a chill grey post-war day, the boy was presented to his great-uncle, a heron of a man with family solicitor written all over him, and to the great-uncle’s wife, in tweed skirt and twin-set from which pearls were not missing, and to the great-uncle’s son, partner and neighbour Charles, whose young wife was called Alicia and whose three-year-old firstborn was Marco. And from then till his catastrophe he had not seen or thought of Swainstead, except when some woman’s face or voice reminded him fleetingly of his liking for Alicia Clare. Until last year, for that liking’s sake and because his wandering convalescent’s freedom was beginning to seem like being lost in space, he had called again at Martlets, and had found Alicia newly widowed, Marco a fraught adolescent half rebellious and half obsessed with duty, the two younger children in different ways disturbed. And somehow he had stayed, tied by threads of old association and new habit. ‘Oh, don’t go away,’ Alicia said once, down-to-earth as a factory foreman; ‘I should be sad.’ ‘You int so much in demand, booy,’ said Marco, ‘that you can’t spare some time for us.’ ‘I
love
Crispin,’ Mikey would enthuse, rubbing his cheek against the cousinly bristles; while Lucy, less extrovert, would sometimes beg: ‘Crispin, do please take Mummy out for a drink, she’s being just awful.’

A high red wall surrounded the house, which stood end-on to the road, showing motorists only a blank gable and some trees. But to the pedestrian the gates disclosed a pleasingly geometrical vista, every window of the black-and-white-house balancing every other window, every beam every other beam, the whole seeming, because of its insistent verticals, longer than it was. Precisely midway in the façade was the big door, before which many a Tudor wagon must have drawn up to receive bales from the loft two stories above. Around the doorway, already elaborately carved, the Melfords, framing the frame, had displayed numbers of martlets. ‘I’ll bet,’ Mark Clare said, ‘those people had a martlet-shaped swimming pool.’

The snowy garden, tree-shadowed, had turned blue. Clare beat on the oak door. Inside, responding swiftly as a dog, Mikey shouted.

When the door opened the glow of the hall burst out across the snow. In the great brick fireplace logs were blazing. It was a large room, normally almost bare but for a carved settle, and the barbaric light danced in every corner. The round shade of an oil-lamp on a card-table before the chimney looked by contrast very pallid.

‘Do be quick,’ Lucy said, and the heavy door banged behind him the moment he stepped forward. She was urgent for his coat. ‘
Isn’t
it perishing? Poor you, you’re all pink and purple.’

Lucy was ten. She was wearing, if not her school uniform, something scarcely distinct. Clare often thought of her, between quotation marks, as a good little body; obliging, cheerful, self-effacing. But while thinking so, he sometimes wondered whether a change might not come with adolescence; whether she would not later find herself deserving of more of her own attention. For the moment, though, she fitted perfectly the space alloted to her, as the family’s one daughter placed between two widely separated, not at all self-effacing males.

The younger of the males put his hand in Clare’s in a proprietorial way and led him nearer the fire. Mikey was six. He was proprietorial about several people, particularly Clare and Marco.

Amabel was seated at the table, her back towards them, her fair head bent. Clare wondered what absorbed her, and peeped over her shoulder. In front of her, arranged in a cross, were five Tarot cards.

‘Good lord,’ he said. ‘Where do you get such things?’

Amabel, roused, looked round at him and smiled. Amabel was seven. Her fair hair was very light, and her eyes a misty confusion of hazel and green. With her fragile features, her tiny voice, the faint reserve which never left her, there was something unearthly about Amabel. Mark addressed her as ‘Tinkerbell’.

A wicked pack of cards
came floating into Clare’s mind as he stared down. On the left was the Hanged Man, looking quite happy. ‘I didn’t know they were still made.’

‘Marco got them in London,’ Lucy said. ‘They tell your fortune somehow.’

‘Crispin,’ said Amabel, in her Tinkerbell voice.

‘Hullo, my changeling.’

‘You made a mistake,’ said Amabel, ‘and there’s going to be trouble, but you’ll get out of it and be very happy. But you will need to be much bolder in love.’

Truly astonished, ‘You are the most extraordinary kid,’ Clare exclaimed. But then all three children burst out laughing, and he understood why Amabel had been so preoccupied when he came in.

‘She’s practised it,’ Lucy let on. ‘She learned that one by heart, out of the little book.’

‘Are we going to do the other thing now?’ asked Mikey. ‘I’ll tell Marco.’ He scampered across the room and bawled up the stairs: ‘Crispin’s here.’

A side door opened, and Alicia came in wheeling a trolley. ‘I thought so,’ she said at the sight of Clare. ‘How nice and punctual you are. Happy New Year.’ He hesitated, then gave her a peck on the cheek. Hardly acknowledging that, she stood examining the glowing hall. ‘Marco’s big blaze was a picturesque idea, but where is there to sit or to put things down?’

‘In the Middle Ages,’ Lucy said, ‘everything happened in the hall.’

‘I shouldn’t be a bit surprised,’ said Alicia primly.

The fire brought out red glints in her hair, which was arranged in what Clare took to be a pageboy style, at least a style recalling the Duc de Berry’s pageboys. The light suited her skin. She looked handsome and young. Suddenly she gave him the smile which she had absently forgotten, and Clare’s heart went out to her. She was still the ally who had amused him when, unhappy with strangeness of the country which was supposed to be his homeland, he had shivered in that house. ‘Amabel,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to use that table, I’m sorry. Oh, those beastly cards, I hate them. Did you know they’re still making them, Crispin?—or making them again. Marco says all that mad old ladies’ stuff is coming back.’

‘I should have thought they would interest you,’ Clare said. ‘Visually, I mean.’ He cut the stack which Amabel had put aside, and gazed upon the Devil. ‘Odd, that. I’ve never seen a chap in tights that had, as you might say, compartments.’

‘Marco’s idea,’ Alicia said, ‘was to inspire me to make money. He thought I might design a pack. He’s sure fortunes are going to be made out of anything that’s irrational.’

Mark Clare, very tall, came down the narrow shadowed stairs into the light, his nineteen-year-old body seeming to be made up largely of blue denim legs. In his recent-schoolboy’s mumble, he said: ‘Happy birthday, Cris.’

‘Have you had a birthday since Christmas?’ said Alicia. ‘How does he know that when I don’t?’

‘In the summer,’ Mark said, ‘we were doing some astrology. Just fooling about, you know. Cris is complicated because he was born in the southern hemisphere. Good practice.’

‘If my father could hear his grandson—’ Alicia began.

‘He’d whip out my nuciform sac,’ Mark said, ‘the old horse-doctor. Intelligence is curiosity, Ma.’

‘Personally, I’d sooner be a cabbage,’ said Alicia, ‘than a crackpot. Cabbages have the respect of their neighbours.’

‘Did Marco say it’s your birthday?’ Mikey barged in.

‘Not today,’ Clare said. ‘The day before yesterday.’

‘How old are you?’ demanded the child, as if suspicious of that answer. He stood four-square in the baronial room, looking up with round blue eyes under his cap of straight, rope-coloured hair. Mikey could be intensely, bullyingly masculine.

‘Twenty-five.’

Amabel, with a flimsy booklet in her hand, began to make a calculation. ‘Two and five is seven. Seven is the Chariot. That’s a very good card, Crispin. Success, health and long life.’

‘She’s eerie,’ Alicia observed aside. ‘Lovely to look at, and super-intelligent, but eerie.’

‘I just hope she’s reliable,’ said Clare.

‘Mummy, how old are you?’ Mikey wanted to know.

‘As old as her tongue and older than her teeth,’ Mark said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ his little brother said squashingly. ‘How old, Mummy?’

‘As old as—’ said Alicia, reflecting; ‘as old as Senator Kennedy.’

‘President Kennedy,’ Lucy said.

‘No, Clever Clogs,’ Alicia said, ‘Senator. He hasn’t been inaugurated yet.’

‘Another number seven,’ said Clare. ‘Success, health and long life.’

‘
How old?
’ Mikey insisted, a tantrum brewing in his voice.

‘Sixty-one,’ Mark said. ‘Poor old boot, she shouldn’t be standing about. Come and park your rheumatics on the settle, gal.’

They lined up on the settle, the three adults and Mikey, like birds on a wire. When Lucy and Amabel had poured the tea and handed sandwiches they joined them. There was plenty of hard shiny room, but the settle did not make for conversation. Mark, at one end, leaned forward and said to Clare, at the other: ‘’Scuse me, squire, is this the line for Hammersmith?’

‘I wondered what was missing,’ Alicia said. ‘No advertisements to read.’

The adults made do instead with the flames which were mounting, revived, about a new pile of long logs. But the children were restless, hurried in their courtesies with sugar or cake. At length Alicia said: ‘All right, Lucy. Get out that silly game, as your heart is set on it.’

Instantly the table was cleared, and the board was conjured from somewhere by Amabel. Mikey seemed to have very precise ideas about the placing of the chairs. Lucy’s final touches were even more precise, measurable in millimetres.

‘Now, Crispin,’ said Mikey, standing lackey-like by a chair.

Clare rose, but hesitated. ‘Who is the other person? Amabel?’

‘I think,’ Lucy said, ‘it’s best if you start with someone who’s really bad at it. That means Marco.’

Mark, getting up, slouched to another chair, collapsed his long legs and grinned at Clare. ‘One does feel a charley,’ he said. Confronted by him, Clare noted that a term of university had already matured and fined down his face, with its sharply angled jaw. He seemed likely to inherit a share of Alicia’s faintly pre-Raphaelite looks.

‘What do we do?’ Clare asked him.

‘Well,’ Mark said, ‘we each put a finger on the little tea-trolley thing, and wait. Thank you, Mikey.’ For Mikey had also precise ideas about the placing of their fingers.

‘I’m waiting,’ Clare said. And went on waiting. Because there was nothing else to look at, they looked at one another, which began to get on their nerves.

From the settle, Alicia remarked: ‘You two have the most fed-up expressions I’ve ever seen on you.’

‘I just don’t find Cris all that interesting,’ said Mark. ‘I mean, he’s normal—he’s got a mouth-shaped mouth and a nose-shaped nose. But there’s nothing you want to linger over.’