The Ivy Tree (14 page)

Con said lazily: ‘His personality's stronger than yours, Lisa my dear.' He, apparently, shared my belief that the bricks of deception could be perfectly well made with the smallest straws of irrelevance. He took a roll off the rack and bit into it. ‘Mmm. Not bad. They're eatable today, Lisa. I suppose that means Mrs Bates baked them.'

His sister's forbidding expression broke up into that sudden affectionate smile that was kept only for him.

‘Oh, have some butter with it, Con, do. Or wait until teatime. Won't you ever grow up?'

‘Isn't Mrs Bates here?' I asked.

Lisa shot me a look, three parts relief to one of apprehension. ‘Yes. She's through in the scullery. Would you like—?'

But before she could finish the sentence the door was pushed open and, as if on a cue, a woman appeared in the doorway, a round squat figure of the same general shape as the Mrs Noah from a toy ark, who stood on the threshold with arms in the traditional ‘akimbo' position, surveying me with ferocious little boot-button eyes.

Lisa led in hastily. ‘Oh, Mrs Bates, here's Miss Annabel.'

‘I can see that. I ain't blind, nor yet I ain't deaf.' Mrs Bates' thin lips shut like a trap. The fierce little eyes regarded me. ‘And where do
you
think you've been all this time, may I ask? And what have you been a-doing of to yourself? You look terrible. You're as thin as a rail, and if you're not careful you'll have lost all your looks, what's left of 'em, by the time you're thirty. America, indeed! Ain't your own home good enough for you?'

She was nodding while she spoke, little sharp jerking movements like one of those mandarin toys one used to see; and each nod was a condemnation. I saw Con flick an apprehensive look at me, and then at his sister. But he needn't have worried; Lisa's briefing had been thorough. ‘
She adored Annabel, cursed her up hill and down dale, wouldn't hear anyone say a word against her; had a frightful set-to with Mr Winslow after she ran away, and called him every tyrant under the sun . . . She's frightfully rude – plain spoken she calls it – and she resents me, but I had to keep her; Bates is the best cattleman in the county, and she's a marvellous worker
 . . .'

‘A fine thing it's been for us, let me tell you,' said Mrs Bates sharply, ‘thinking all this time as you was lost and gone beyond recall, but now as you
is
back, there's a few things I'd like to be telling you, and that's a fact. There's none can say I'm one to flatter and mince me words, plain spoken I may be, but I speak as I find, and for anyone to do what you gone and did, and run off without a word in the middle of the night—'

I laughed at her. ‘It wasn't the middle of the night, and you know it.' I went up to her, took her by the shoulders and gave her a quick hug, then bent and kissed the hard round cheek. I said gently: ‘Make me welcome, Betsy. Don't make it harder to come home. Goodness knows I feel bad enough about it, I don't need you to tell me. I'm sorry if it distressed you all, but I – well, I was terribly unhappy, and when one's very young and very unhappy, one doesn't always stop to think, does one?'

I kissed the other cheek quickly, and straightened up. The little black eyes glared up at me, but her mouth was working. I smiled, and said lightly: ‘And you must admit I did the thing properly, dreadful quarrel, note left on the pincushion and everything?'

‘Pincushion? What did you ever want with a pincushion? Never did a decent day's work in your life, always traipsing around after horses and dogs and tractors, or that there garden of yours, let alone the house and the jobs a girl ought to take an interest in. Pincushion!' She snorted. ‘Where would you be finding one of them?'

‘Well,' I said mildly, ‘where did I leave it?'

‘On that mantelpiece as ever was,
which
well you remember!' She nodded across the kitchen. ‘And when I come down that morning I was the one found it there, and I stood there fair pussy-struck for five mortal minutes, I did, afore I dared pick it up. I knew what it was, you see. I'd heard you and your Granda having words the night before,
and
I heard you go to your room just after, which well you know I did. I didn't never think to have the chance to tell you this, but I folleyed you along, Miss Annabel, an' I listened outside your door.' Another nod, more ferocious than the last. ‘I did that.
Which
I won't take shame to meself for doing it, neither. If you'd 'a bin upset-like, which you being only a girl, and your Granda playing Hamlet with you, there's times when a girl needs a woman to talk to, even if it's nobbut Betsy Bates, as was Betsy Jackson then. But if I'd had any idea as you was in real trouble, which I never thought—'

I was very conscious of Con just at my shoulder. I said quickly: ‘Betsy, dear—'

I saw Con make a slight, involuntary movement, and thought: he doesn't want me to stop her; he thinks I'll learn something from all this.

He needn't have worried, she had no intention of being stopped until I had heard it all.

‘But there wasn't a sound, not of crying. Just as if you was moving about the room quiet-like, getting ready for your bed. So I thought to meself, it's only a fight, I thought, the old man'll be sorry in the morning, and Miss Annabel'll tell him she won't do it again, whatever she done, riding that Everest horse of Mr Forrest's maybe, or maybe even staying out too late, the way she has been lately, and the old man not liking it, him being old fashioned that way. But I thinks to meself, it'll be all right in the morning, the way it always has been, so I just coughs to let you know I'm there, and I taps on the door and says: “I'm away to bed now, Miss Annabel,” and you stopped moving about, as if I'd frightened you, and then you come over to the door and stopped inside it for a minute, but when you opened it you still had all your things on, and you said: “Good night, Betsy dear, and thank you,” and you kissed me, you remember, and you looked so terrible, white and ill, and I says, “Don't take on so, Miss Annabel,” I says, “there's nought that doesn't come right in the end, not if it was ever so,” and you smiled at that and said “No.” And then I went off to bed, and I never heard no sound, and if anyone had tell't me that next morning early you'd up and go, and stay away all these years, and your Granda fretting his heart out after you, for all he's had Mr Con here, and Julie as is coming this week, which she's the spitting image of you, I might say—'

‘I know. Lisa told me. I'm longing to meet her.' I touched her hand again. ‘Don't upset yourself any more. Let's leave it, shall we? I – I've come back, and I'm not going again, and don't be too angry with me for doing what I did.'

Lisa rescued me, still, I gathered, trying to bring the straying runner back on course. ‘Your grandfather'll be awake by now. You'd better go up, he'll want to see you straight away.' She was reaching for her apron strings. ‘I'll take you up. Just give me time to wash my hands.'

I saw Mrs Bates bridle, and said smoothly enough: ‘Don't trouble, Lisa. I – I'd sooner go up by myself. I'm sure you'll understand.'

Lisa had stopped half way to the sink, looking irresolute, and rather too surprised.

Mrs Bates was nodding again, with a kind of triumph in the tight compression of her mouth. Con took another new roll, and saluted me with a tiny lift of the eyebrow as he turned to go. ‘Of course you would,' he said. ‘Don't treat Annabel as a stranger, Lisa my dear. And don't worry, Annabel. He'll be so pleased to see you that he's not likely to rake up anything painful out of the past.'

Another lift of the eyebrow on this masterly
double-entendre
of reassurance, and he was gone.

Lisa relaxed, and seemed to recollect something of her lost poise. ‘I'm sorry.' Her voice was once more even and colourless. ‘Of course you'll want to go alone. I was forgetting. It isn't every day one gets a – an occasion like this. Go on up now, my dear. Tea'll be ready in half an hour . . . Mrs Bates, I wonder if you would help me with the teacakes? You're a much better hand at them than I am.'

‘Which is not to be wondered at, seeing as how I'm north country bred and born,
which
no foreigner ever had a good hand with a teacake yet,' said that lady tartly, but moving smartly towards the table.

Lisa had stooped again to the oven. Her back was towards us. I had to say it, and this was as good a moment as any. ‘Betsy, bless you, singin' hinnies! They look as good as ever!'

Lisa dropped the oven shelf with a clatter against its runners. I heard her say: ‘Sorry. Clumsy,' in a muffled voice. ‘It's all right, I didn't spill anything.'

‘You don't think,' said Mrs Bates crisply, ‘that them singin' hinnies is for you? Get along with you now, to your Granda.'

But the nod which went along with the briskly snapping voice said, quite plainly: ‘Don't be frightened. Go on. It'll be all right.'

I left the kitchen door open behind me.

It was obvious that no questions of identity were going to rouse themselves in the minds of Mrs Bates and her husband; but the real ordeal was still ahead of me, and if there were ever going to be questions asked, my every movement on this first day was going to be important.

So I left the door open, and was conscious of Lisa and Mrs Bates watching me as I crossed the flagged back lobby, pushed open the green baize door which gave on the front hall, and turned unhesitatingly to the right before the door swung shut behind me.

‘It's a very simple house,' Lisa had said. ‘It's shaped like an L, with the wing shorter than the stem of the L. The wing's where the kitchens are, and the scullery, and what used to be the dairy, but all the dairy work's done in the buildings now, so it's a laundry-house with a Bendix and an electric ironing machine. There's a baize door that cuts the kitchen wing off from the main body of the house.

‘It's not the original farmhouse, you know, it's what you might call a small manor. It was built about a hundred and fifty years ago, on the site of the old house that was pulled down. You'll find a print of the original farm-house in Bewick's
Northumberland
: that was a square, grim-looking sort of building, but the new one's quite different, like a small country house, plain and sturdy, certainly, but graceful too . . . The main hall's square, almost an extra room . . . a wide staircase opposite the front door . . . drawing room to one side, dining room to the other with the library behind; that's used as an office . . . your grandfather's bedroom is the big room at the front, over the drawing room . . .'

As the baize door shut, I leaned back against it for a moment, and let myself pause. It could not have been more than three quarters of an hour since I had met Bates in High Riggs, but already I felt exhausted with sustained effort. I must have a minute or two alone, to collect myself, before I went upstairs . . .

I looked about me. The hall had certainly never been built for an ordinary farmhouse. The floor was oak parquet, and the old blanket-chest against the wall was carved oak, too, and beautiful. A couple of Bokhara rugs looked very rich against the honey-coloured wood of the floor. The walls were plain ivory, and there was a painting of a jar of marigolds, a copy of the Sartorius aquatint of the Darley Arabian, and an old coloured map of the North Tyne, with
Forreft Hall
clearly marked, and, in smaller letters on a neat segment of the circle labelled
Forreft Park
, I identified
Whitefcar
.

Below the map, on the oak chest, stood a blue ironstone jug, and an old copper dairy-pan, polished till its hammered surface gleamed like silk. It was full of blue and purple pansies and wild yellow heartsease.

Whitescar had certainly not suffered from Lisa's stewardship. I reflected, in passing, that Lisa had been wrong about Mrs Bates. Mrs Bates by no means disliked her; her attitude of armed neutrality was a faint reflection of the ferocious affection she had hurled at me. Anyone who could keep a house as Lisa had, had almost certainly won Mrs Bates' loyalty, along with as lively a respect as a Northumbrian would care to accord a ‘foreigner'.

I went slowly up the wide oak staircase. The carpet was moss-green and thick; my feet made no sound. I turned along the landing which made a gallery to one side of the hall. At the end of it a window looked over the garden.

Here was the door. Oak, too, with shallow panels sunk in their bevelled frames. I put out a finger and ran it silently down the bevel.

The landing was full of sunlight. A bee was trapped, and blundering, with a deep hum, against the window. The sound was soporific, dreamy, drowning time. It belonged to a thousand summer afternoons, all the same, long, sun-drenched, lazily full of sleep . . .

Time ran down to nothing; stood still; ran back . . .

What did they call those queer moments of memory? Déjà vu? Something seen before, in a dream perhaps? In another life I had stood here, facing this door, with my finger on the carving that, surely, I knew as well as the skin on my own hands . . . ?

The moment snapped. I turned, with a sharp little movement, and thrust open the casement beside me. The bee bumbled foolishly about for a moment or two, then shot off into the sunlight like a pebble from a sling. I latched the window quietly behind it, then turned and knocked at the door.

Matthew Winslow was wide awake, and watching the door.

He lay, not on the bed, but on a broad, old-fashioned sofa near the window. The big bed, covered with a white honeycomb quilt, stood against the further wall. The room was large, with the massive shiny mahogany furniture dear to the generation before last, and a thick Indian carpet. The windows were charming, long and latticed, and wide open to the sun and the sound of the river at the foot of the garden. A spray of early Albertine roses hung just outside the casement, and bees were busy there. For all its thick carpet, cluttered ornaments, and heavy old furniture, the room smelt fresh, of sunshine and the roses on the wall.