The Ivy Tree (2 page)

I followed up my advantage. I said, rudely, because I had been frightened, and so felt foolish: ‘And now will you please go away and leave me alone?'

He didn't move. He stood there staring, then said, still in that edged, angry tone that was somehow smudged by doubt: ‘Are you trying to pretend that you don't recognise me? I'm your cousin Con.'

‘I told you I didn't. I never saw you in my life. And I never had a cousin Con.' I took a deep, steadying breath. ‘It seems I'm lucky in that. You must be a very happy and united family. But you'll excuse me if I don't stay to get to know you better. Goodbye.'

‘Look, just a minute – no, please, don't go! I'm most terribly sorry if I've made a mistake! But, really—' He was still standing squarely in the path which would take me back to the farm track, and the main road. The cliff was still sheer to one side, and the water, far below us, smooth once more, glassed the unruffled sky. But what had seemed to be a dramatic symbol of menace towering between me and freedom, had dwindled now simply into a nice-looking young man standing in the sunshine, with doubt melting on his face into horrified apology.

‘I really am most desperately sorry! I must have frightened you. Good God, what on earth can you think of me? You must have thought I was crazy or something. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I, well, I thought you were someone I used to know.'

I said, very drily: ‘I rather gathered that.'

‘Look, please don't be angry. I admit you've every right, but really – I mean, it's pretty remarkable. You could be her, you really could. Even now that I see you closely . . . oh, perhaps there are differences, when one comes to look for them, but – well, I could still swear—'

He stopped abruptly. He was still breathing rather fast. It was plain that he had indeed suffered a considerable shock. And, for all his apology, he was still staring at me as though he found it difficult to believe me against the evidence of his eyes.

I said: ‘And I'll swear too, if you like. I don't know you. I never did. My name isn't Annabel, it's Mary. Mary Grey. And I've never even been to this part of the world before.'

‘You're American, aren't you. Your voice. It's very slight, but—'

‘Canadian.'

He said slowly: ‘
She
went to the States . . .'

I said violently and angrily: ‘Now, look here—'

‘No, please, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it!' He smiled then, for the first time. The charm was beginning to surface, now, through what I realised had been still a faint filming of disbelief. ‘I believe you, truly I do, though it gets more fantastic every minute I look at you, even with the foreign accent! You might be her twin . . .' With an effort, it seemed, he dragged his uncomfortably intent stare from my face, and bent to caress the dog's ears. ‘Please forgive me!' The swift upward glance held nothing now but a charming apology. ‘I must have scared you, charging up like that and looming over you like a threat from the past.'

‘My past,' I retorted, ‘never produced anything quite like this! That was some welcome your poor Prodigal was going to get, wasn't it? I – er, I did gather you weren't exactly going to kill the fatted calf for Annabel? You did say Annabel?'

‘Annabel. Well, no, perhaps I wasn't.' He looked away from me, down at the stretch of gleaming water. He seemed to be intent on a pair of swans sailing along near the reeds of the further shore. ‘You'd gather I was trying to frighten her, with all that talk.'

It was a statement, not a question, but it had a curiously tentative effect. I said: ‘I did, rather.'

‘You didn't imagine I meant any of that nonsense, I hope?'

I said calmly: ‘Not knowing the circumstances, I have no idea. But I definitely formed the impression that this cliff was a great deal too high, and the road was a great deal too far away.'

‘Did you now?' There, at last, was the faintest undercurrent of an Irish lilt. He turned his head, and our eyes met.

I was angry to find that I was slightly breathless again, though it was obvious that, if this excessively dramatic young man really had intended murder five minutes ago, he had abandoned the intention. He was smiling at me now, Irish charm turned full on, looking, I thought irritably, so like the traditional answer to the maiden's prayer that it couldn't possibly be true. He was offering me his cigarette-case, and saying, with a beautifully calculated lift of one eyebrow: ‘You've forgiven me? You're not going to bolt straight away?'

I ought, of course, to have turned and gone then and there. But the situation was no longer – if, indeed, it had ever been – dangerous. I had already looked, and felt, fool enough for one day; it would look infinitely more foolish now to turn and hurry off, quite apart from its being difficult to do with dignity. Besides, as my fright had subsided, my curiosity had taken over. There were things I wanted to know. It isn't every day that one is recognised – and attacked – for a ‘double' some years dead.

So I stayed where I was, returned his smile of amused apology, and accepted the cigarette.

I sat down again where I had been before, and he sat on the wall a yard away, with the collie at his feet. He was half turned to face me, one knee up, and his hands clasping it. His cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth, the smoke wisping up past his narrowed eyes.

‘Are you staying near by? No, I suppose you can't be, or everyone would be talking . . . You've a face well known in these parts. You're just up here for the day, then? Over here on holiday?'

‘In a way. Actually I work in Newcastle, in a café. This is my day off.'

‘In
Newcastle
?' He repeated it in a tone of the blankest surprise. ‘You?'

‘Yes. Why on earth not? It's a nice town.'

‘Of course. It's only that . . . well, all things considered, it seems odd that you should have come to this part of the world. What brought you here?'

A little pause. I said abruptly: ‘You know, you still don't quite believe me. Do you?'

For a moment he didn't reply, that narrow gaze still intent through the smoke of the cigarette. I met it squarely. Then he unclasped his hands slowly, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. He tapped ash off it, watching the small gout of grey feathering away in the air to nothing.

‘Yes. I believe you. But you mustn't blame me too much for being rude, and staring. It's a queer experience, running into the double of someone you knew.'

‘Believe me, it's even queerer learning that one
has
a double,' I said. ‘Funnily enough, it's a thing one's inclined to resent.'

‘Do you know, I hadn't thought of that, but I believe you're right! I should hate like hell to think there were two of me.'

I thought: and I believe
you
; though I didn't say it aloud. I smiled. ‘It's a violation of one's individuality, I suppose. A survival of a primitive feeling of – what can one call it – identity? Self-hood? You want to be
you
, and nobody else. And it's uncomfortably like magic. You feel like a savage with a looking-glass, or Shelley seeing his
doppelgänger
one morning before breakfast.'

‘Did he?'

‘He said so. It was supposed to be a presage of evil, probably death.'

He grinned. ‘I'll risk it.'

‘Oh, lord, not your death. The one that meets the image is the one who dies.'

‘Well, that is me. You're the image, aren't you?'

‘There you are,' I said, ‘that's just the core of the matter. That's just what one resents. We none of us want to be “the image”. We're the thing itself.'

‘Fair enough. You're the thing itself, and Annabel's the ghost. After all, she's dead.'

It wasn't so much the casual phrasing that was shocking, as the lack of something in his voice that ought to have been there. The effect was as startling and as definite as if he had used an obscene word.

I said, uncomfortably: ‘You know, I didn't mean to . . . I should have realised that talking like this can't be pleasant for you, even if you, well, didn't get on with Annabel. After all, she was a relative; your cousin, didn't you say?'

‘I was going to marry her.'

I was just drawing on my cigarette as he spoke. I almost choked over the smoke. I must have stared with my mouth open for quite five seconds. Then I said feebly: ‘Really?'

His mouth curved. It was odd that the lineaments of beauty could lend themselves to something quite different. ‘You're thinking, maybe, that there'd have been very little love lost? Well, you might be right. Or you might not. She ran away, sooner than marry me. Disappeared into the blue eight years ago with nothing but a note from the States to her grandfather to say she was safe, and we none of us need expect to hear from her again. Oh, I admit there'd been a quarrel, and I might have been' – a pause, and a little shrug – ‘well, anyway she went, and never a word to me since that day. How easily do you expect a man to forgive that?'

You? Never, I thought. There it was once more, the touch of something dark and clouded that altered his whole face; something lost and uncertain moving like a stranger behind the smooth façade of assurance that physical beauty gives. No, a rebuff was the one thing he would never forgive.

I said: ‘Eight years is a long time, though, to nurse a grudge. After all, you've probably been happily married to someone else for most of that time.'

‘I'm not married.'

‘No?' I must have sounded surprised. He would be all of thirty, and with that exterior, he must, to say the least of it, have had opportunities.

He grinned at my tone, the assurance back in his face, as smoothly armoured as if there had never been a flaw. ‘My sister keeps house at Whitescar; my half-sister, I should say. She's a wonderful cook, and she thinks a lot of me. With Lisa around, I don't need a wife.'

‘Whitescar, that's your farm, you said?' There was a tuft of sea-pink growing in a crevice beside me. I ran a finger over its springy cushion of green, watching how the tiny rosettes sprang back into place as the finger was withdrawn. ‘You're the owner? You and your sister?'

‘I am.' The words sounded curt, almost snapped off. He must have felt this himself, for he went on to explain in some detail.

‘It's more than a farm; it's “the Winslow place”. We've been there for donkey's ages . . . longer than the local gentry who've built their park round us, and tried to shift us, time out of mind. Whitescar's a kind of enclave, older than the oldest tree in the park – about a quarter the age of that wall you're sitting on. It gets its name, they say, from an old quarry up near the road, and nobody knows how old those workings are. Anyway, you can't shift Whitescar. The Hall tried hard enough in the old days, and now the Hall's gone, but we're still here . . . You're not listening.'

‘I am. Go on. What happened to the Hall?'

But he was off at a tangent, still obviously dwelling on my likeness to his cousin. ‘Have
you
ever lived on a farm?'

‘Yes. In Canada. But it's not my thing, I'm afraid.'

‘What is?'

‘Lord, I don't know; that's my trouble. Country life, certainly, but not farming. A house, gardening, cooking – I've spent the last few years living with a friend who had a house near Montreal, and looking after her. She'd had polio, and was crippled. I was very happy there, but she died six months ago. That was when I decided to come over here. But I've no training for anything, if that's what you mean.' I smiled. ‘I stayed at home too long. I know that's not fashionable any more, but that's the way it happened.'

‘You ought to have married.'

‘Perhaps.'

‘Horses, now. Do you ride?'

The question was so sudden and seemingly irrelevant that I must have looked and sounded almost startled. ‘Horses? Good heavens, no! Why?'

‘Oh, just a hangover from your looking so like Annabel. That was her thing. She was a wizard, a witch I should say, with horses. She could whisper them.'

‘She could
what
?'

‘You know, whisper to them like a gipsy, and then they'd do any blessed thing for her. If she'd been dark like me, instead of blond, she'd have been taken for a horse-thieving gipsy's changeling.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘I do know one end of a horse from the other, and on principle I keep clear of both . . . You know, I wish you'd stop staring.'

‘I'm sorry. But I – well, I can't leave it alone, this likeness of yours to Annabel. It's uncanny. I
know
you're not her; it was absurd anyway ever to think she might have come back . . . if she'd been alive she'd have been here long since, she had too much to lose by staying away But what was I to think, seeing you sitting here, in the same place, with not a stone of it changed, and you only changed a little? It was like seeing the pages of a book turned back, or a film flashing back to where it was eight years ago.'

‘Eight years is a long time.'

‘Yes. She was nineteen when she ran away.'

A pause. He looked at me, so obviously expectant that I laughed. ‘All right. You didn't ask . . . quite. I'm twenty-seven. Nearly twenty-eight.'

I heard him take in his breath. ‘I told you it was uncanny. Even sitting as close to you as this, and talking to you; even with that accent of yours . . . it's not really an accent, just a sort of slur . . . rather nice. And she'd have changed, too, in eight years.'