The Ivy Tree (32 page)

‘Which are not', said Lisa, ‘so far distant, though even I have not the heart to have the brute put down, and leave those wretched kittens to starve to death somewhere. But if I find them before they're too big, they'll certainly have to drown. Did Mr Seton say he was going over to West Lodge now? Annabel, would you be an angel and go across with him as far as the gardens, and get some strawberries? I rang up, and Johnny Rudd said he'd keep them for us. They should be ready, so hurry back, if you don't mind; we'll have them all to pick over.'

Something must have shown in my face, for I saw her recollect herself for the first time for days. She must have forgotten that I had not yet been across to the gardens.

I saw her eyes flicker with a moment of calculation, and then she turned to Donald, who spoke first. He must have seen something too; he saw more than one thought, I reflected; but of course he put my hesitation down to simple physical causes.

‘Annabel's tired. Look, I can easily drop in at the market garden for you. You go past it to get to the Lodge, don't you?'

I said: ‘It's all right, Donald, thanks all the same. I'm not tired, and if you've to see Mr Forrest at the Lodge, time will be getting along by the time you manage to get away, and besides, you don't want to have to hurry. I'll come along with you now, if I may, and walk straight back with the strawberries by the short cut, and then we can get on with hulling them. I'd like to see Johnny Rudd, anyway. He'll be in the garden?' This to Lisa.

‘Yes.' Her eyes were on me. ‘You haven't seen him since you came back, have you? His hair's going grey now, but he hasn't changed much. He's the only one who'll still be working there by this time; he said he'd wait if he could. The two boys go off at five. But if Mr Forrest should be in the garden—'

‘Oh, did I tell you?' I said. ‘I saw him the other day.'

‘Did you?' The question only just missed being too sharp. ‘To speak to?'

‘For a moment. I forget what we talked about, but I thought he'd changed, rather a lot.' I picked up the basket. ‘I'll be as quick as I can,' I said.

What had been the old walled kitchen-garden of Forrest Hall lay beside the stables, about a quarter of a mile from the West Lodge, where Adam Forrest now lived. It was reached by the road that led from beside the Hall gates, through the plantations above Whitescar, and over a mile or so of moorland in the centre of the peninsula. A rough track from Whitescar led steeply up to join this road, which finished at the Lodge.

Even here, at West Lodge, some pomp remained from the once palmy days of the Forrests. The entrance to the stableyard – now worked as a small farm – was a massive archway, with shields bearing the same heraldic beasts that flaunted their improbable attitudes on the gateposts at Forrest Hall. Over the arch stood the old clock-tower, with a gilded weather-vane over it. Trees crowded close on the other side of the lane, and the river glittered just beyond them. The road was rutted, and green with weeds, its verges deep in wild flowers, but the cobbles of the yard, glimpsed through the archway, were sparkling clean, like the shingle on a seaswept beach. A little way off, beyond a clump of laburnum and copper beech, the chimneys of West Lodge glinted in the sunlight. Smoke was rising from one of them. Life at Forrest Park had shifted its focus.

Beyond the stableyard stretched the twelve-foot-high wall of the kitchen garden. There was a wrought-iron gate set into it.

‘This one?'

‘Yes.'

Donald stopped the car, and I got out.

‘Now, don't bother about me. It's just as quick taking the cut back across the fields. I'll go that way.'

‘If you're sure—'

‘Quite sure. Thanks for the lift. I'll see you at dinner.'

The car moved off. I pushed the gate open.

The last stretch of the lane had been deep under trees. Now, I walked through the gate, between two massive yews, and into a brilliance of sunshine that made me blink and narrow my eyes.

It wasn't only the brightness, however, that gave me pause. Here, the contrast with the moonlit derelict at Forrest was both striking and disturbing. In this garden, filled with sun and warmth and scent inside its four high walls, everything, at first sight, was as it might have been in the eighteenth-century heyday of the place.

All along one wall was the glass, and under it I could see the peaches and apricots and grapes of a more luxurious age, still carefully pruned and trained, and beneath them the homely forests of tomatoes and chrysanthemum seedlings, and the occasional splashes of colour that meant hydrangeas or begonias coming into flower for the market. Along the other three walls were the espaliered fruit trees. The fruit, small, green and shining, crowded thickly on the boughs against the warm sandstone.

Down the centre of the garden went a broad walk of turf, beautifully cut and rolled, and to either side of this was a flower border, spired and splashed and shimmering with all the colours of an English June; lupins, delphiniums, peonies, poppies, irises, Canterbury Bells, all held back by lavender swags of catmint, and backed by a high rustic trellis where climbing roses held up their fountains of bright flowers. At the far end of the walk, at the focal point, as it were, of the vista, I could see the basin of some disused stone fountain, with a couple of bronze herons still on guard over what had been the pool. This was set round with flagstones, between which were clumps of lavender, rosemary, thyme, and sage, in a carefully planned confusion as old as the garden itself. They must have left the old herb garden, I thought, and this one avenue of flowers. The rest was all order and usefulness – peas and beans and turnips and potatoes, and regimented fruit bushes. The only other thing that spoke of the glory that had departed, was a tall circular structure in one corner of the garden, a dove-house,
columbarium
, with honeysuckle and clematis running riot over its dilapidated walls. The pegged tiles of its roof sagged gently over the beams beneath, as canvas moulds itself to the supporting ropes. The tiles showed bronze coloured in the sunlight, their own smoky blue overlaid and softened by the rings of that lovely lichen that spreads its amber circles, like water-lily leaves, over old and beautiful things. The dove-doors had decayed, and looked like empty eye-sockets; I saw starlings fly out.

But elsewhere all was order. Not a weed. I reflected that if Adam Forrest and Johnny Rudd kept all this themselves, with the help of a couple of boys, I could hardly taunt him with not understanding the meaning of labour. The place must be killing work.

At first I couldn't see anyone about at all, and walked quickly up the grass walk, towards the green-houses, peering through the rose trellis to right and left. Then I saw a man working among raspberry-canes over near one of the walls. He had his back to me, and was stooping. He was wearing faded brown corduroys, and a blue shirt, and I could see an old brown jacket hung near him over a stake. He had dark hair with grey in it.

He didn't seem to hear my approach, being intent on fastening a bird-net back securely over the canes.

I stopped on the path near him. ‘Johnny?'

He straightened and turned. ‘I'm afraid—' he began, then stopped.

‘You?' For the life of me I couldn't help sounding unbelieving. This was certainly the Adam Forrest I had met and spoken with a few nights ago, but now, facing him in the broad glare of the afternoon, I could see how different he was from my remembered picture of him. What I had seen on that last, almost dreamlike meeting, had been something like seeing a sequence from a film taken years ago, when he had been ten, no, fifteen years younger. Some unreality of the night had lent itself to him: I remembered the fine planes of his face, the smoothness of skin young in the moonlight, the darkness of hair and eyes dramatised in the drained light. In the moonlight he had seemed merely tallish, well enough built, and had moved easily, with that air of self-confidence that goes with strength – or with inherited wealth. Now, as he straightened in the sunlight to face me, it was as if the film had spun along swiftly, and the actor had, with skilful make-up, confirmed the passage of years. His hair, which had been very dark, was showing grey, not gracefully, at the temples, but in an untidy flecking all over, like the dimming of dust. The fine structure of strong bone couldn't be altered, but there were lines I hadn't seen by moonlight, and he was thinner than the size of his frame should have allowed. Before, he had been conventionally dressed, and I had noticed neither the cut nor the quality of his clothes; but now the light showed up a working shabbiness that – so unconsciously he wore it – must have been part of every day. Some part of my mind said that of course it was only common sense to wear rough clothes for a rough job, but another part, that I had not known existed, linked the shabbiness with the lines on his face, and, the greying hair, and winced away from them with a pity I knew he didn't want, and that I had no right to feel. I noticed that he was wearing gloves, and remembered my taunt about his hands, and was sorry.

He smiled at me, narrowing his eyes against the sun. They were grey-blue, and puckered at the corners. He spoke easily, as if there could be no constraint between us.

‘Hullo. Were you looking for Johnny Rudd? I'm afraid he's gone.'

‘I came for some strawberries. The cat's been at the trifle, and it's Grandfather's birthday, so Lisa rang up with an SOS, and Johnny said he'd try to save some.'

‘Then he'll have left them up in the packing-shed. Come and see.'

We walked up the path together. I saw him eyeing me, as curious as I had been, no doubt, to see what the daylight showed.

I said: ‘Have you met Julie's young man? Donald Seton?'

‘No. Why?'

‘He came across with me just now, to see you about something, but he thought you'd have finished for the day, so he went along to the Lodge.'

‘Oh? What's it about, d'you know?'

‘Yes, but I'll leave him to tell you himself.' I caught his quick look, and smiled a little. ‘Oh, don't worry, it's nothing personal. You're still quite safe.'

We had reached a door in the wall behind the green-houses, which led to the workrooms of the place – boiler-room, potting-houses, cold frames. He stopped with his hand on the knob, and turned. I noticed all at once that his eyes looked tired, as if he didn't sleep well. ‘Safe?
I?
'

‘Indeed, yes. If you're not an accessory after the fact, I don't know what you are. You never came after that passport. You never came across to Whitescar, and tried to trip me up and catch me out in front of Grandfather, as no doubt you think you could easily have done. You've done nothing. Why?'

‘I don't know. I honestly don't know.' He hesitated, as if to say something more. Then, instead, he merely turned, and pushed the door open for me. ‘This way, now; leave the door, it's all right; Seton may come looking for me. Is Julie with him?'

‘No. She's gone into Newcastle with Bill Fenwick.'

He shot me a look. ‘That troubles you. Why?'

‘Because Con won't like it one bit,' I said crisply, ‘and Con is a . . . creature of impulse.'

‘That's absurd.' He said it as he had done before, but with just a shade less conviction.

‘Any situation bordering on violence is absurd – until it suddenly breaks, and then,
wham
, there you are, in the middle of something you'd thought only happened in the Sunday Press.'

‘What about this man who's here, Seton, was it?'

‘That's different. He'll take her away from Whitescar, and they'll live in London, and spend half the year in a tent somewhere, digging. Con's all for that, as you may imagine – and the further away, the better. Uzbekistan, for instance, or the Desert of Lop, if the Romans went there. I wouldn't know.'

‘Does she want to go?'

‘Pining to,' I said cheerfully. ‘Don't worry, I've practically fixed it. I told you I'd look after Julie.' I caught his eye, and laughed. ‘What is it?'

‘This – crazy business; and I'm as crazy as any part of it. That's what comes of working by instinct instead of sense; I suppose women do it every day, but I'm not accustomed to it, and I dislike it. There's nothing to assure you that you're still rational. Look at the situation: I'm not sure who you are; I'm not sure what you're doing; I'm certain it's wrong; but for some reason I'm prepared to let you do it.'

‘I told you who I was, and what I was doing.'

‘Yes, you did. You were honest, as far as that went. And you've got me into a position where I seem to be condoning what you do, even though I'm damned if I do more. I suppose it's because I think rather a lot of old Mr Winslow, and oddly enough, I'd trust you over Julie, who seems to me to be the only other person who matters. I confess I'd wondered, before you came, just what the set-up would be at Whitescar, when Mr Winslow died. You say you're “looking after” her interests. Well, as long as Julie comes to no harm, I don't care how much you and Connor fight it out the rest of the way. If you can get it, I shan't grudge you your “competence”.'

‘You needn't worry; you can trust me over Julie.'

He sighed. ‘The odd thing is, that I believe you, and for that alone I deserve to be behind bars as an accessory, just as soon as you are. Here's the packing-shed. Come and see if Johnny's left your strawberries.'

The shed was big and cool, its basic smell, of geraniums and damp peat, dizzily overlaid by that of a tank crammed full with sweet peas. It was as orderly as the garden: there were shelves of plant-pots and boxes, in graded sizes; printed labels in rows (probably in alphabetical order); raffia hanging in loops that looked as if they would never dare tangle or snap; and two or three pairs of clean cotton gloves on a hook beside the window.