The Song of Hartgrove Hall (8 page)

I study him surreptitiously. He's chosen not to find a job and instead has been attempting to fix the most desperate of the damage to the house – it's a forlorn task, akin to sticking his finger in a dyke, but I'm taken aback by his skill. There's now a hefty slab of silver oak as a mantelpiece in the great hall, and he's carved three running foxes into the wood. They're both crude and beautiful. I found him in the attic, gathering up all the old photographs of the house and estate, scrutinising them for God knows what. He has piles of ancient almanacs and farming magazines in his room – some of them dating from before the First World War. I can't think what use he can put them to. This morning I watched from my window as he hurried across the lawn, I presumed returning from an early walk, but now I wonder whether instead he'd been out all night. He never talks about pals or girls and I hope he's happy. I can't ask. It's not the sort of thing we do.

In the distance the church clock chimes the half-hour.

‘Shall we?'

I nod and together we shoulder the hamper into the boot of the car. It's already hot and my shirt sticks to my back. The ancient and magnificent magnolia tree on the front driveway is still in bloom, the flowers huge and blowzy, with fleshy pink petals – like fat, tarty girls in ball gowns. I've always liked it. The General would prefer it chopped into firewood. I pick fallen and browning petals from the car's paintwork and, somehow unable to discard them, shove them into my pocket.

‘Bags I drive,' I say, leaping into the driver's seat before George can object.

I drive too fast because it's a gorgeous day and I'm filled with happiness at the thought of the picnic and seeing Jack whom I haven't seen for simply ages. And Edie. I bat her name away and swerve around a pothole. George grips the door but doesn't tell me to slow down. It's a ten-minute drive to the station but we make it in eight and I feel a surge of triumph.

‘Do you want to go and meet them? I'll wait with the car,' says George.

‘Righto.'

I leap out of the car and am jogging onto the platform as their train pulls in, and I wish for a moment that I'd picked some of the cowslips sprouting on the lawn to present to Edie. It dawns on me how daft that is – as if she's a visiting dignitary or my girl or something – and then they're here and Jack's thumping my back and Edie's standing behind him, leaving space for the effusion of our reunion, and she's even prettier than I remember in her yellow summer dress and her crooked half-smile and I almost can't breathe.

‘Hello, Fox,' she says. ‘You can kiss me if you like.'

I don't. I glance at my feet and mumble, ‘Hello, Edie. Jolly nice to see you.'

We return to the car and to my exasperation I see that George has nipped into the driver's seat. Sneaky so and so. Jack and Edie climb into the back and, as we hurtle along the narrow lanes and I glance back, I notice how Edie slithers into Jack as we take each bend. George catches me looking and quickly I turn away.

We park near a tumbledown mill. George and I heave the basket between us, leaving Jack and Edie to go ahead with the piles of blankets and scout a spot to sit. It's the first hot day of the year and the ground still has the soft bounce of early summer. The grass is long and thick. A cricket ticks in steady crotchets. The river sloshes in easy curves, gnats misting the surface. Several cows watch us, bored, flicking flies with mucky tails. We halt in a field of dandelions. There are thousands upon thousands of them, constellations of vivid, sickly-yellow flowers. Jack flops down and instantly his shirt is tarnished with pollen.

Methodically, George unpacks the picnic onto a blanket. Edie tries to help but he waves her away. We eat in lazy silence until there is nothing left, passing the bottle of hock between us. As a concession to Edie we brought glasses but we entirely forget to use them and she doesn't complain. The hock thrums in my head and I'm still thirsty. We should have brought water to drink in this heat. Jack lies back amongst the dandelions, his hair so gold in the sunlight that the flowers look gaudy beside him.

‘Lie here with me,' he says to Edie but she shakes her head, lolling in the shade of a willow. She's removed her stockings and I can't help noticing that her white skin is almost translucent. There is a fine fuzz of pale hair on her legs. Jack reaches over and tickles her foot. He gazes at her with something uncomfortably like adoration. I look away.

‘How old would your mother have been today?' she asks and I'm taken aback. We come here every year on Mother's
birthday but we never speak about her. We eat. We lark about and perhaps take a dip in the river and then we return home. I glance at George and register his surprise but he doesn't seem to mind.

‘Fifty-two,' he says. ‘She would have been fifty-two.'

I don't wish to talk about Mother as that would mean I'd need to pretend to be sad. The sun is too hot and the sky is glazed in a too-flawless blue for sadness. Jack clearly feels the same.

‘And how old is your mother?' he asks Edie, propping himself up on his elbow. ‘And when does she get the pleasure of meeting me?' he adds, turning it, as he does everything, into a joke.

Edie smiles and digs in her bag for cigarettes but Jack continues to stare at her. It occurs to me that, beneath the teasing, he's quite serious. He wants to meet her family, I think. He hasn't yet and he wants to.

‘I'm not telling you how old my mother is, because it shows you how old I am,' she says archly, plucking a dandelion and flinging it at him.

He loves her, I decide, but he doesn't really know her at all. I thought loving someone entailed knowing every little detail about them – but then perhaps that's not love, merely familiarity. I'd like to be more familiar with Edie, I think, and then, embarrassed, I feel heat rise into my cheeks. That bloody hock. I check my watch – it's nearly five, we've been here for ages.

‘I have to go soon,' I tell the others.

‘Whatever for?' asks Jack.

‘There's an old bloke nearby who knows a good many songs, apparently. I've been invited to tea.'

Edie leans forward, hugging her knees. ‘Found anything good lately?'

‘A few. Mostly around Cambridge but I want to hear the
old Dorset songs again. Those are my favourites. Nothing sounds half so pleasant as the songs of home.'

She studies me for a moment and then asks, ‘Can I come with you?'

‘I don't see why not. Can't think why the old chap would mind. We should get going, though.'

As Edie starts to put her stockings back on, Jack sits up and grabs her ankle. ‘Don't leave me. I shall be bereft without you.'

She shakes him off. ‘Stop it, Jack, you're being a pest.'

He flops back in the grass, unconcerned. ‘Come for a swim first.'

‘Absolutely not,' I say. ‘We simply don't have time.'

—

Dripping wet from our swim, we hurry across the fields in bare feet. I wonder how it is that Jack invariably gets his own way. It's a rare and unacknowledged gift. In the pub after several pints we sometimes debate what special power we'd like best and I always thought it would be super to fly, but really I think it would be better to always get my own way.

‘Slow down, Fox,' says Edie. ‘You're going awfully fast.'

‘Sorry.'

I wait for her to catch up. Her wet hair hangs loose in a plait. I've never seen her with her hair down and she appears younger, girlish. Her movements are precise and balletic and she possesses a careful self-constraint as if everything she utters is weighed and measured first. As I've got to know her better, I've found to my surprise that she's not quite the absolute stunner I'd imagined. Of course she's attractive, and in photographs she's made up to be beautiful. I've noticed too that on meeting strangers she always behaves as though she is a lovely woman to whom they ought to be paying court and, somehow, without fail they do.

This afternoon any make-up has been washed clean away by the swim and she seems less contained and for once unselfconscious as she strides through the grass. She plucks the petals from a daisy, scattering them on the verge. There is a tiny streak of mud on her cheek and I don't tell her, knowing that, as soon as I do, she'll seize her pocket handkerchief and scrub it off, self-conscious again. I prefer her like this.

We're to walk to Christopher Lodder's cottage and afterwards back to the Hall. It's a longish walk – nearly seven miles all told – but Edie assures me she can manage it. Also I don't want Jack appearing at the cottage after an hour or whenever he's bored, to collect us in the car. He never can keep time. Things happen precisely when he wishes them to. I make an effort to slow my pace again – I have the itch of excitement I always get when I'm off song collecting.

‘When we were boys George pressed leaves, orchids and butterflies between the pages of his schoolbooks so he could take little bits of Hartgrove with him. With me it was songs so I could listen to home. There's nothing better for remembering. The songs from a place, the ones that grow there and have been sung down the generations, those are the ones that capture the essence of it. They're like the specific smell of river mud, except that when you're away from the river you can't quite recall it precisely.'

‘And Jack? What did Jack take?'

‘I don't know. Nothing, Jack never gets homesick, as far as I can tell. Wherever he goes, he's the centre of it all, magnificently present, never pining for anywhere else.'

She makes no reply, knowing it to be true.

‘The tunes are often the same but, if you listen carefully enough, you spot a variation in the last verse and the words inevitably change from singer to singer. The best folk songs are living things, shifting with each performance. You can never really catch them.'

‘But you still try?'

I laugh. ‘Of course.'

Old Lodder doesn't mind that I've brought Edie. In fact, it rather perks him up. He looks right past me but ushers her inside to the coolness of the cottage, seating her in the best chair by the window with a view of the vegetable patch and its row of exquisite green lettuces squatting in the earth. In the distance the river glints and I can hear goldcrests squabbling in the bulrushes.

Lodder is so tall and angular, it's a wonder he fits into the low cottage – he's hunching as he disappears into the kitchen concealed behind a fading curtain. It's cramped and dark in the parlour, the walls painted brown in the Victorian fashion of seventy years earlier and the low beams stained darker still. There's a milking stool, two good chairs, a solid and handsome dresser on which is displayed a hotchpotch of mismatching china. The only picture on the wall is a photograph of a stern, austere woman buttoned into a high-necked gown. I can't tell whether it was his grandmother, mother or wife. The room smells very strongly of cabbage. An overflowing bucket of vegetable peelings and slops perspires nicely beside the range. To my excitement, there is no wireless and I'm hopeful of finding a good song hoard, full of old tunes, not just popular hits. I arrange my manuscript pad on my knee and sharpen my pencil.

‘What happens next?' whispers Edie, conscious of Lodder busily brewing tea like a magician behind the partition curtain.

‘I'll ask him to sing us some songs. Hopefully there'll be something we haven't heard before and, if there is, I'll write it down.'

‘Do you write down the melody or the words?'

‘I try to do both. I sometimes get in a bit of a muddle.'

‘Let me help. Give me a page and I'll try to scribble down
the words. I don't think I could manage the tune accurately enough. I don't have perfect pitch like you.'

Before I can ask how she can tell that I have perfect pitch – which I do; it's a source of both satisfaction and irritation – Lodder reappears with a tea tray laden with chipped teacups and a saucer of stale biscuits. Dutifully we sip. He sits on the milking stool apparently perfectly comfortable, his spindly legs folded up beside his ears like a daddy-longlegs.

‘This one's fer you, missy,' he says, grinning at Edie, and he launches into a rendition of Edie's most celebrated hit, ‘A Shropshire Thrush'. I sag and rub my eyes. It was a mistake to have brought her with me. We listen politely. It never does to interrupt.

‘That was very pleasant, Mr Lodder,' I say.

‘An honour to sing it fer the lady,' he declares, clearly pleased as Punch with himself. ‘I never thought I'd see the day. Never thought it.'

‘But we'd love – Miss Rose would love to hear one of your own songs. Your nephew told me that you know some Dorset folk songs.'

He frowned. ‘What you want to hear that stuff fer?'

Edie leans forward. ‘I'd like to hear something. I'd like it very much.'

He pauses, scratches his nose. ‘All righty. Fer the lady then.' He refolds his legs and then sings in a clear baritone.

The notes flutter out of the open window and I hear the goldcrests fall silent for a moment as though they're listening too. There's a dignity to him as he sings. He nods once to Edie and then seemingly forgets her, forgets there is any audience at all; he's alone with his song. It's unmistakably English, like the scurry of oak leaves shaking in the rain. As the sound floods the gloomy little parlour I'm filled with a sense of rightness as though he is singing my own thoughts
back to me. I've heard variations on this song before. However, it's not its familiarity that is raising the hairs along the back of my neck, but the shiver of loss and longing, and the knowledge that I'm listening to a melody sung down the generations. In his voice I hear a score of other voices converge and there is a shining moment when I can see both forwards and backwards, when time rocks to and fro upon the empty hearth.

—

Afterwards we stroll outside. I'm as tickled as anything. I have two new songs for my collection. I expect they're probably variants of other more common songs but it doesn't matter. I like the tune of one in particular and I know it will rattle around inside me for the rest of the day. I experience a supine contentment as if I'd eaten a meaty dinner. I want to sit down and have a cold glass of something and smoke a fag. I also want to look over Edie's notes – she's been dashing off pages like a schoolgirl in an exam – but it seems impolite in front of the old chap.