The Tender Glory (14 page)

He looked at her curiously.

“One would almost think you liked doing this sort of work,” he remarked.

“I do, in a way,” she confessed. “It’s—a sort of definite achievement, making butter.”

“But in no way to be compared with making music.” His tone was sardonic.

“No.” She met his eyes steadily. “The two are entirely different.” “Are you suggesting one can parcel one’s life out in small quantities?” he asked harshly. “So much of this, so much of that?”

“Why not?” She turned to the fire. “It’s how life is.”

“Not invariably.” His mouth was grim. “Some people take what they want. Everything in one parcel.”

“They’re lucky,” she declared. “I can’t see that one has any choice.”

“Sometimes not.” He came to stand beside the fire. “It depends on the individual, I suppose. How long is your mother going to be away?”

“Three weeks—perhaps a month. Then she will probably go on somewhere to convalesce. She won’t be fit to do anything here till the spring.”

“Which would be too late for you to return to London.”

She faced him.

“Yes.”

“You regret that, of course.”

“I regret not being able to finish my studies.”

“You could try again.”

She shook her head.

“It wouldn’t be the same. Besides, Craigie Hill may need me for some time to come.”

“You’re giving up a great deal,” he reminded her.

“Not any more than my mother deserves.”

He took the eggs from her.

“Supposing the offer was renewed?” he suggested. “Supposing the scholarship was amended to give you another year?”

She bit her lip.

“I couldn’t accept it,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to say with any certainty when I could go.”

“You were fairly ambitious, I gather. Dedicated, I think the word is.”

“Yes.” She met his steely gaze with a certain amount of challenge in her own. “Why not? It was my life, my whole existence.”

Abruptly he moved towards the door.

“I can understand that,” he said. “Music has always meant a great deal in my family. My mother was a brilliant pianist, although she never allowed it to dominate her life. She was a gifted woman who accepted marriage as her primary

responsibility. Music was a great joy to her, a compensation, in many ways. Calders must have seemed unbelievably remote when she first saw it.” This was only the second time he had mentioned Calders, deserted by his own decree.

“I remember the concerts she used to give,” Alison mused. “They seemed wonderful to me—all these talented people coming here to our remote glen to sing and play. Then, when we heard about the scholarship, it seemed we hadn’t been forgotten, either. Sometimes I think I’ve let you down,” she added a trifle unsteadily, “not going through with it, but for me there was no alternative.”

“Another chance may come your way,” he said briefly. “It’s never too late to succeed.”

When he had gone she thought about the offer he had made, for surely it
had
been an offer? The renewal of the Isobel Daviot Scholarship to give her one more year in London! Her spirits soared. It would mean so much, the chance to prove herself, after all, to identify herself with the music she loved.

But even if he remembered to renew his offer, how long would he hold it open? For a month, or a year? She might need all of that time to see her mother and Craigie Hill through this present emergency. Could she hope—really hope—that Huntley would wait long enough?

She cherished the idea deep in her heart. It would make such a difference to her. The tasks she performed about the house were suddenly lightened. It was no longer a drudgery to rise at dawn to scrub and clean and grade eggs and churn butter before she set out on the long journey to Wick and back.

The short daylight hours were still blessed with pale sunlight and it gilded everything in her sight. Each trip she made saw her mother further on the long road back to complete recovery. Helen, responding to the expert care she was receiving, had been given the extra stimulus of a contented mind. Robin’s letter from Canada was always beside her, lying on the locker top, and although it had yet to be replaced with a second one she seemed prepared to wait.

Each time she visited the hospital Alison called in at the cottage on the Milton Road. Jim was rarely at home, but she and Cathie soon became the firmest of friends, despite the seven years’ difference in their respective ages.

“I don’t know what I would have done without you, Cathie,” she said on one occasion when she was about to leave on her return journey to Craigie Hill. “Or without this spell of amazing weather. Here we are thinking ahead to Christmas and the sun still warm!”

“We’ve been lucky,” Cathie agreed, glancing quickly at the sky, “but most things come to an end, good and bad. I’ll be surprised if you get back tonight without rain.”

The sun went down over the moors without any of its accustomed glory. A pale sky merged into the greyness of night with hardly a star showing through, and soon the thin film of cloud had changed into a dark cumulus building up in the west. It hung above the mountain peaks, obscuring their lofty heads, and when the dawn came the sky was as red as blood. The sea and the rocks beneath the promontory were coloured by it and even Sterne looked faintly pink. The anger in the sky could scarcely be misinterpreted.

Alison set off early with the milk, hoping to finish her round before the storm broke.

“We’re in for a spell o’ it now,” Neil commented, stacking the milk crates in the van. “We’ll have snow before the day’s out or my name’s no’ Neillie Kinloch! It’ll blow first, and maybe rain, but when the hills are like they were yesterday we’re in for snow. It’s been long in comin’ this year, so it’ll mak’ up for it. We’ve seen the last o’ the fine weather for a while.”

It was a dismal thought if you had to work in it, Alison decided, yet snow had always delighted her, and if the lochans froze over they could skate. The work at Craigie Hill was easing a little. Kirsty was up and about again and Neil had got into what he called ‘his stride’.

If it was no more than an easy-going canter she knew she mustn’t grumble. At least he was pulling some of his weight.

Sterne looked deserted. She put the milk beside the step, sheltering it with a convenient stone. If Huntley had come to the door she might have been tempted to ask him about his offer to renew the scholarship, but there was no sign of life anywhere.

Searching the shore, her eyes narrowed against the lifting spray, she wondered if he had gone down there to secure his lobster-pots, but the only movement among the rocks was the ceaseless shifting of the bird life. Cormorant and gannet, gull and kittiwake circled and wheeled, fighting for a sheltered place beneath the cliff. They knew the storm was coming.

Alison drove swiftly towards the glen. A wind was rising and the trees moaned, tossing and swaying against it. The previous storm’s havoc was still evident, although most of the fallen timber had been lopped and piled on one side of the road, ready to be carted away. The shortcut through Calders tempted her. It would be quicker to go that way to the Lodge.

Huntley had also been at work on the avenue. The pines which had leaned drunkenly against their neighbours were all felled and neatly trimmed, ready to be led to the road. At least, she thought, he hadn’t abandoned the amenities of the place to their fate. It was the house itself he avoided.

Coming upon it round the final bend in the drive, she thought how lovely it looked, yet how sad. There could be nothing more desolate than a house which has been left to die. Calders had been a show-place, but now all the little signs of decay were beginning to appear: the unkempt appearance of the doorway; the deserted garden; a broken trellis; a shutter flapping in the wind.

The ground floor rooms were all shuttered, barring any unauthorised entry. That was how Huntley wanted it to be.

She drove on, feeling guilty of trespassing on his sorrow, yet feeling, too, that Calders was a house that ought to be lived in.

Tessa was waiting for her when she reached the Lodge.

“You take your time,” she remarked ungraciously. “I’ve promised Huntley breakfast and we’re short of milk.”

“I’m sorry,” Alison apologised. “I had no idea I was late.”

Tessa was in one of her less generous moods.

“I hate getting up on a morning like this,” she grumbled. “I suppose the post will be late, too.”

“He was delivering in the glen,” Alison told her. “The wind might make him a few minutes late, but he’ll get here eventually.”

Tessa’s eyes went beyond her to the man approaching them from the road. Huntley had left the jeep outside the main gates.

“I’m glad you’ve come back,” she said, the colour rising faintly to her cheeks. “I’ll soon have the bacon sizzling and Alison has brought us some eggs.”

Alison felt dismissed.

“I’ll push on,” she murmured awkwardly. “It looks as if we’re in for another storm.”

She should have told him about the flapping shutter, she thought on her way back to Craigie Hill, but perhaps he would go to Calders after Tessa had made his breakfast. Surely he would inspect the house from time to time, especially in such inclement weather.

The swinging shutter gave her no peace even when night came. It banged through her dreams to the violent accompaniment of the storm. Again and again she woke, hearing it in imagination, and lying for a long time afterwards, thinking of Calders weeping in the rain, thinking of Huntley and Leone, whom he still loved.

Perhaps he would love her always, chained to her memory because she had been everything he desired in a woman, because their interests had been the same, their lives entwined by the silver chord of music which even death couldn’t sever.

And Tessa? Where did she come in? Was he going to marry Tessa without loving her? Tessa had hinted as much, fighting her sister’s power, Tessa who could be harsh and unlovely at times because she was haunted by the thought of Leone.

There seemed to be something disturbingly hidden about Tessa, something almost treacherous, like a dark stream running beneath the surface. While she still nurtured her resentment of Leone in the secret places of her heart she could be dangerous.

Robin’s name haunted Alison and the memory of Huntley out there on the promontory, because now she had added her own quota of love to the maelstrom of emotions which swept the dark headlands surrounding Sterne. A thousand other follies would have better than that.

Throughout the night the storm heightened and well into the following day. A mighty raging of water followed her wherever she went, and then, suddenly, it ceased. She hadn’t attempted to deliver the milk to Sterne during the morning, but once the wind had dropped she had no excuse. When the van’s engine stalled on the bridge over the gushing Calder she felt defeated. She would have to walk.

Allowing the van to run into the side of the road, she grasped a bottle of milk and took the short-cut through the estate.

Water ran everywhere, seeping through the trees and rushing in the ditches. The sodden earth on either side of the drive would take no more. Calders, when she reached it, looked damp and miserable, with the open shutter hanging drunkenly on one hinge. There was nothing she could do about it, but an odd instinct which had nothing to do with curiosity took her round to the back of the house.

In this direction Calders had faced the full onslaught of the storm. All the windows on the east side looked out across the terrace to the North Sea, and evidence of the night’s wild havoc was everywhere. Trellises were down and an arm from a nearby tree had been flung by the wind against the house itself. It had torn the shutter from a downstairs window, shattering the glass and scattering fragments of wood across the wet paving-stones. A velvet curtain, torn out at the height of the storm’s fury, hung damp and bedraggled on the broken frame.

There wasn’t much she could do apart from attempting to close the window and reporting the damage at the Lodge on her way back.

Tugging at the curtain, she managed to free it. There was broken glass everywhere and it snapped like a pistol-shot each time she trod on it. The room beyond looked like a battlefield. If a typhoon had struck Calders there couldn’t have been much more damage. Lamps had been overturned and vases lay on the floor. Near the window the dust-sheet had been whipped from a magnificent grand piano and draped almost elegantly across a nearby chair. The piano itself was wet and already marked by rain.

Instinctively she went towards it, stepping over the low window sill. It was a beautiful instrument and she could think of nothing but the fact that it was being destroyed.

Lifting the dust-sheet, she began to mop up the surplus water from the highly-polished case, completely unaware of the man who watched her through the half-open doorway leading to the hall.

Miraculously the dust-sheet had remained dry. Blown across the chair, it was out of the path of the rain and it served her well. The piano was dry if not exactly shining by the time she had finished with it.

Straightening the overturned lamps, she paused for a moment to look about her. It was a lovely room, long and exquisitely furnished, with a large open fireplace at one end and double doors leading to the south side of the terrace at the other. Softly carpeted in rose pink, it had a warmth which even its present desolation couldn’t destroy. It was a room meant to be lived in.