The Song of Hartgrove Hall (10 page)

I was astonished at how quickly the boy learned. Within a month he understood the musical notation system – even though he remained quite unable to read or write his letters.
He was a small starving man; no matter how much I fed him – Mozart, a touch of Handel, a sprinkle of Mendelssohn – he wanted more. I suppose I ought to have been more restrained, I was the adult after all, but I was greedy too. I wanted to know what more he could do – the child appeared almost limitless in his abilities.

And yet he was a child. One of the farm cats strolled into the music room and he was instantly down from his seat, crouched on all fours, dangling bits of string and roaring at it. When he was too tired to pick up a melody instantly, or if a complex sequence of fingering required effort and concentration, he'd lie on the floor and sob. With my own fervour interrupted, to my shame I'd huff with irritation and I'd be ready to tick him off, much as I would have done a third-desk violin during rehearsal, when suddenly I'd catch myself. I'd notice the littleness of the creature prostrate on the carpet, the hiccuping sobs. When he got into such a state, I'd try to persuade him down to the kitchen for a cup of cocoa or a walk around the garden, but he never wanted to come. All he wanted was to play the piano. Once or twice he fell asleep mid-rage. I felt ashamed for pushing so hard and forgetting that he was not some impetuous music student from the academy but my own grandson.

October was tipping towards November and during our time together I'd kept the poor child inside. I'd told myself it was because the weather had been poor and he liked to spend hours in the music room at the piano but I heard a voice in my mind, Edie's voice, insisting that children also want to watch hours of television and eat chocolate until they're sick, and it's the adult's task to moderate such excess. Guiltily, I recognised that I'd kept Robin at the piano out of selfishness.
During his lessons Edie drifted into the background. Her loss remained a chronic pain, but one blunted by a powerful analgesic. The boy's talent was a luminescence that rippled outwards, and I followed it like a man overboard grasping at a light in the dark.

I still could not sleep but in the long hours before dawn, instead of huddling in the cold, feeling the shape of silence beside me, I made lists of pieces to play for Robin. I'd started with the usual children's tunes – Humperdinck's
Hansel
and Gretel
or Prokofiev's
Peter and the Wolf
and the candy-cane waltzes that my own daughters had enjoyed, but like the unusual child who prefers olives to sweeties, Robin preferred Bach to Strauss. As I lay awake, dawn crept in at the windows to the call of a woodlark. I decided to start the day with Vaughan Williams and his
Lark Ascending
.

Robin listened to the cadences of soaring sound, his mouth ajar and his eyes half closed – an indication of intense pleasure. He had the same expression when eating vanilla ice cream.

‘A lark's a bird?' he asked at the end.

‘Yes.'

‘Like a chicken?'

‘No. Not like a chicken.'

‘Like a duck then?'

‘A lark is a wild bird. She's nothing like a chicken or a duck.'

He stared at me, puzzled. He didn't understand the concept of a songbird. I was filled with an energy I hadn't felt for months.

‘I think we should go out and hunt for a lark this morning.'

‘I want to play on the piano.'

He stuck out his bottom lip, which trembled, threatening tears.

‘You can't play a lark until you've heard one in our woods.'

‘I've been a lion and I didn't heard one of those in our woods.'

I was about to argue further when I remembered Edie's caution – never enter into a debate with a child which you cannot win.

‘Let's start by listening for a woodlark. You never know, we might get lucky and find a lion too.'

—

By the time I'd bribed him into his coat (a clear violation of Edie's rules – but her resolve was always much stronger than mine) and both wellington boots, I was exhausted, almost ready to telephone Clara and ask her to come early to collect him. Sternly, I told myself that I wasn't being fair to the boy. He must know green woods and lost love and a thousand other things, or his music will be an echo without a soul. I glanced down at Robin with his twin channels of yellow snot beneath his nose and his mis-buttoned red raincoat, and wondered whether I was being overambitious. No, I must hold firm. The boy must know more than music. We'd start with a lark.

The ground was wet from the morning's rain, but the clouds had cleared into dirty drifts like roadside snow, leaving glorious streaks of blue sky. The effect of the light made all the colours brighter; the green of the grass appeared to glow, while the huddles of woodland conspiring on the hillside stood out in relief like illustrations in a pop-out book, the treetops glazed in red and brown. I smelled autumn in the air.

‘I want a biscuit.'

‘In a minute.'

‘My legs hurt.'

‘Nearly there.'

‘No we're not.'

I clutched Robin's hand tightly, and half dragged, half cajoled him up the hill, slip-sliding in his rubber boots. We entered the hush of the woods, the light smeared with a
yellowish hue. We'd planted more than ten thousand trees over the last half-century, and the copse that had survived the war had spread long fingers of oak and ash across the shoulders of the hill. Robin sunk into silence and stuck close to my side. He glanced about, alert. Moss and lichen coated the upper branches of the rowans, which twisted in creaking spirals towards the sunlight. I led him deeper into the thicket, past a pile of stones. Robin stopped.

‘What's that?' he asked, pointing.

‘It's a grave marker. Your great-uncle George is buried there.'

Robin squatted down and scrutinised the stones. An earwig mountaineered across the uneven heap. Rotting leaves coated the topmost pebbles with brown sludge.

‘Why isn't he in a churchyard? Isn't that where you're supposed to put dead people?'

‘Yes, well, George wasn't much for God. And, in fact, you're quite right. We really oughtn't to have buried him here. They're quite strict about those sorts of things. But they can't really send him to prison now, can they?' I said with a smile – it was a line I'd delivered many times since the small and somewhat illegal funeral in the woods.

Robin did not laugh. ‘No,' he said slowly. ‘They won't put him in prison. But they might dig him up.'

‘I won't let them,' I said with some resolve. ‘George liked it here. These woods were his favourite place in all the world. He loved Hartgrove. This was his home and he never, ever wanted to leave it. Now he doesn't have to.' I picked up a fallen stone and slotted it back onto the heap. ‘I like coming to visit him. One day, I expect I'll be buried here too.'

Robin wiped his nose with his sleeve, smearing a glistening streak of mud across his face. ‘I'll come and visit you,' he announced magnanimously. ‘But not often. It's a very long walk.'

‘That's terribly kind of you, darling. I'm sure I'll appreciate it,' I said.

‘Did you dig the hole for Uncle George?' asked Robin, after a moment.

‘I didn't do it myself. Is that what you mean?'

Robin nodded.

‘A man dug it for me,' I said, intrigued as to why he wanted the details.

‘Good,' said Robin, relaxing ever so slightly. ‘I don't think you would have digged it properly, Grandpa, and I wouldn't like it if bits of Uncle George were poking out.'

He glanced about warily, clearly uneasy about the close proximity of George, eyeing the odd twigs lying on the woodland floor with great suspicion as though they were really finger bones.

‘There's really nothing to worry about, darling. A dead person is no more horrid than a dead tree.'

‘Or a spider.'

‘Exactly.'

‘I don't like spiders.'

I didn't feel that my introduction to the pleasures of the countryside was progressing terribly well.

‘Shall we walk a little, and try to find our lark?'

Robin nodded and allowed me to lead him deeper still. We listened for an hour or more to the music of the wood. We picked out the bright note of a robin, the ever-cheery soul who knows only one song and a jolly one at that. After a while we detected our woodlark.

‘Do you hear that?' I whispered.

Robin nodded. ‘Can we chuck it bread now?'

He still thought that the woodlark was like a duck in the park. Fat and idle and waiting for scraps of mouldy crusts.

I sighed. This child wasn't as I had been. He was a creature of modernity and suburbs. He was used to fenced-in gardens and rows of uniform houses neatly addressing one another across the street like maiden aunts over the tea-table. He was
driven everywhere in an air-conditioned, temperate box that neatly sealed him off from the untidiness beyond.

‘I'm cold, Grandpa. I want to go home.'

Subdued and tired, we turned back. The rain started up again, a gauze of drizzle that dripped from my cap and down my neck. And then a gunshot rang out.

Bang. Bang. The echo cracked through the trees. I grabbed Robin's shoulders and pressed him close against my legs, my heart thundering in my chest.

‘Get out here and show yourself!' I shouted. ‘How dare you shoot in my woods? How bloody dare you!'

I must admit that there's nothing like an unauthorised gun to make me come over all feudal. There was a rustle and then a pause. I could tell he wasn't far off – probably just assessing the level of threat to his own skin. Presumably upon seeing that we were an old man and a small boy, he stepped out from behind an oak and sauntered towards us, stopping thirty yards off. He was short, bundled into a dark waterproof jacket, woollen hat pulled low. He held a rifle. A proper huntsman's gun. This was no local youth taking a furtive pop at a pheasant.

‘What the hell are you doing here? I certainly didn't give you permission.'

He studied us for a moment in silence, clearly deciding which version of the truth to recount. ‘There's no problem, mister. I'll go. No trouble.'

‘Damn right you will. I should call the police. This is trespass.'

He held up his hands. ‘Whatever you like. Was an honest mistake. Jon Bentley hired me. I'm out looking for a stray dog that's been worrying his sheep on the hill. Lost twenty ewes this week, he has. I followed it into the woods. I thought this here were Bentley's woods. My mistake.'

‘Well, they're not. Twenty ewes, you say?'

‘Aye. Them that was killed outright. There was another ten what had to be shot.'

‘Good grief. I didn't know.'

‘Said he didn't want ter bother you with it. That you had enough on yer mind.'

I was unsettled. Beside me Robin fidgeted and squashed a beetle with his heel.

‘Can I carry on now? I wouldn't have hurt you. I heard you a mile off and I were shooting the other way.'

I hesitated. ‘A dog, you say?'

‘Aye.' He shifted the gun into his other hand.

‘Must be the size of a bloody wolf to need that calibre gun. So, no. I'm sorry for Bentley but I don't like it. I won't have a man with a rifle on my land. You need to leave, and if I catch you again, I will call the police.'

The man swore and spat but he turned and headed away, towards the edge of the woods and the open back of the hill. Robin tugged on my arm. ‘Come on, Grandpa.'

‘Just a minute. I want to make sure he's gone.'

‘Are you going to shoot him if he comes back?' For the first time that morning, he sounded enthusiastic.

‘No, of course not.'

‘Because I won't tell Mummy, if you do.'

I laughed and we started back down the hill, and yet I couldn't shake the sensation that beneath the rain-soaked scrub something crouched, watching.

Robin's behaviour improved. With his energy and interest channelled into music, he no longer bit and scratched his sisters or tore the pages out of picture books. He remained a quiet child. Clara fretted that he was withdrawn but I tried to reassure her that he never seemed quiet with me.