He made his approximate dispositions and turned his steps to the wooded spur. Ever since he had lived here, this had been the rendezvous of wildflowers of every species, but dominating throughout the summer were the serried ranks of foxgloves, his favourite periwinkle, and wandering convulvulus wreathing itself among the spires of rosebay willow herb that marched all the way up the slope to the heavy timber at the summit.
He would not disturb this overmuch, despite old McCready's annual grouse that it was a source of weeds that bid fair to ruin his kitchen garden below. He knew that Henrietta liked this corner of the estate and the old Colonel had liked it, too. All that was needed was a careful rearrangement of rocks and the cultivation of rock plants in all the crevices. He went down again and into the house, where Henrietta was hearing young Margaret at a lesson. “Turn her loose and do the rounds with me,” he said. “I’ve finished planning outside and I’m about to make a start in here.”
She came willingly enough. It had taken her a month or two to get accustomed to seeing him about at all hours of the day, but now that she had she liked it well enough, for he never interfered in her domestic schedules.
It was mid-June then, with sun flooding the whole southern façade of the house and exposing corners where the maids had scamped their dusting. He said, moving into the big drawing room, “I never did subscribe to this passion for clutter in rooms one uses as much as we use this one, the study, and the big bedroom upstairs. Most of the houses I’ve entered in the last twenty years have been crammed with furniture and trumpery knick-knacks. Rubbish, most of it, and dust-traps galore. Nowadays it's the fashion to embellish everything. I don’t know why, unless it's the trademark of the Johnny-Come-Lately. The English once had a reputation for clean, straight lines and spaciousness, and kept their rooms in period. Mind you, one can be too pedantic. This place, built in the 1580s, was once furnished almost exclusively with black oak, but this eighteenth-century mahogany, walnut, and rosewood I’ve introduced looks at home here.” He trailed off, stopping here and there to make notes, for he had plans to buy more furniture and pictures and porcelain, so that she could see herself enlisting another maid or two to keep it waxed and gleaming.
Aside from clothes, she had no kind of taste herself and freely admitted it. She was content to leave the arrangement of the rooms to him, not only because he had always been deeply interested in English craftsmanship but also because it gave him a lasting excuse to stay at home and keep her company. She needed his company more than ever now. All but two of the children had flown, and three of them—Alex, Joanna, and Helen—were as good as lost to her, together with the offspring they had produced and were likely to produce. Alex and Lydia appeared occasionally, for he was back in the Western hemisphere now, with a roving commission to Imperial garrison posts queueing up to be initiated into the mysteries of that new gun Lydia had foisted on the British army. Joanna, based on Dublin, came less often, and none of them had seen Helen since the week of her wedding. Young Hugo drifted in from time to time, sometimes once or twice a week between business trips and athletic meetings, and George had returned to his mill-house so that she had the company of Gisela and the babies. Stella she saw once a week, and Stella's tribe were always in and out of the place, borrowing ponies, building wigwams, and fishing down by the islet that she always thought of as Shallott. Giles, and that handsome wife of his, lived nearer London and spent their holidays in Wales, a part of Wales she had never visited, although Giles said it was the most spectacular part of the British Isles. Young Edward was here throughout his school holidays and Margaret was here all the time, but she was a solitary child and not much company to a fifty-year-old woman whose main interest, apart from the family, was in clothes.
Henrietta said, as she trailed after Adam, “You don’t really want my opinion, Adam. It isn’t worth having, anyway, not about this kind of thing. I can run a house as well as any woman alive, but I can’t re-create one, the way you seem bent on doing. Won’t that landscaping, added to what you intend doing in here, cost a great deal of money?”
“Practically all we have to our private credit,” he said, cheerfully, “but it will appreciate, mark my words. One or other of them will doubtless reap the benefit. There’ll come a time when connoisseurs will pay very high prices indeed for some of these oils and pieces I’ve picked up in my travels. The rubbish most cabinetmakers are turning out now will be used for firewood, as it richly deserves.” He stood back and looked at her whimsically. “Are you telling me you really can’t appreciate the difference between the kind of furniture your father has in that red-brick monstrosity of his in Wythenshawe, and that Derby comport over there, or the Pembroke table it's standing on?”
“Not really,” she admitted, “to me it's just a pretty bowl and a nice table, and Sam's house is stuffed with china and tables, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, “it is indeed. Mostly Staffordshire fairground prizes, and great bulbous-legged pieces tortured into fantastic shapes and smeared all over with layers of varnish. To say nothing of yards of drapery tacked up everywhere. The place has no kind of welcome for anyone but a junk-dealer.”
“Well,” she said, “Sam never cared for anything but money-making, and you’ve done your share of that. Like it or not, you left me to run this great place single-handed for long enough.”
“I’m not complaining,” he said, smiling, and gave her one of his playful but heavy-handed slaps on the bottom, so that she skipped nimbly away from the bed and slammed the door on Phoebe Fraser, who happened to be passing down the corridor.
“Complaining? I should think not indeed! But while we’re on the subject, do have some regard for the servants about the place. I’m sure I don’t know what you’ll say or do next since you came home and left George to get on with it. Just then, for instance, whatever will Phoebe think…?” But he only threw back his head and laughed, so that she felt a little spurt of pleasure that he was so content here and showed no signs of pining for the business that had absorbed him so completely over the years.
All their married life they had been adjusting and readjusting to one another and this, she supposed, was no more than another phase in their relationship. He beckoned her over to the window and stood to limn for her the southern vista he planned, but she was less concerned with his prattle of ponds and pine plantations than the fact that he put his arm round her waist and then, almost absentmindedly, turned his head and kissed the back of her neck. It was all at one with his mood these days, as if, finally off-loading that fearful burden he had carried, he felt younger and more hopeful of the future. He showed it in the way he talked about George and George's impending spring-clean, about Lydia's salutary effect on Alex, about Joanna's young Jack-o’-Lantern (he invariably referred to Clinton by this name) currently reorganising the Irish sector, about the regeneration of “poor old Giles” since he had taken the bit between his teeth and finally married that madcap, Romayne. But, above all, it showed in his attitude to her, for although he was in his early sixties he made love to her more than occasionally, and always with the same gusto. It established beyond any doubt that he still found her personable, was still able to find extreme pleasure in her body, as he had from the earliest days of their marriage. Standing here, his arm about her waist, she had one of those sudden insights into the girl she had been when he had dumped her at his father's lakeside house and rushed south on his very first foray. She remembered then how she had been assailed with doubts as regards her appeal to him as a bride, wondering, as she stood looking at herself in Aunt Charlotte's swing mirror, whether a man of his worldly experience would find her as pretty as she found herself as she playfully measured her eighteen-inch waist with a blue hair ribbon. Well, there was nothing to worry about on that score, even at this late stage. Only a few hours before he had held her in his arms and made her feel like a bride again.
She said, unable to restrain her exultation, “You do just whatever you’ve a mind to do with the place. I’m
sure I won’t care, so long as you don’t go traipsing off again.”
He took her at her word. By midsummer the place was a hive, with seemingly every labourer for miles around making inroads into the paddocks and coppices. McCready, poor man, was dragged from his beloved vegetables, saddled with a couple of boys, and set to work on the rockery behind the house. From the oak and beech clump west of the right-hand paddock came the sound of hammer and saw as the Hermitage took shape, and almost every day one of his pinnaces or frigates arrived to unload something he had picked up somewhere and dumped in a warehouse to await collection. A brace of carpenters invaded the house to make brackets and niches in unadorned corners, and when he unpacked his crates and shook the shavings from a piece of Rockingham or Spode, or a statuette of an armless Venus or a dying gladiator, he reminded her of one of the children opening presents on Christmas morning.
The fine weather broke in August and the violated left-hand paddock, where they were deepening the depression and digging the feed channel for the lake, took on the appearance of a field under the walls of a besieged town, with trenches, sapheads, and ramparts connected by plank runways for the stream of barrows. Autumn, however, was dry and sunny, so that the ground soon hardened again and progress speeded up. By late October the transformation could be seen, if only in outline, and she could make some kind of sense out of a master plan spread out in her sewing room, confound him, where she had once grappled with administrative work during his absence after the imminent arrival of Giles had compelled her to abandon the yard.
By a happy chance everyone save Helen and her missionary husband was on hand for Christmas, Gisela's third son (christened, to Henrietta's delight, Adam) having been born in early autumn. At supper that night, when they were all gathered at the long table set in the drawing room where there was space enough to accommodate them, she had one of her Queen-Empress impressions, especially when George, bottle-merry by then, proposed a toast to her and the eight grandchildren asleep in various parts of the house. There were now nine, in fact, but Joanna's daughter, Valerie, had been left in charge of a nurse at home, “too young to take her chances with the Irish sea” as Jack-o’-Lantern put it. And soon, if her observation was as accurate as it usually was in this respect, there would be ten, for Giles's wife, Romayne, was looking tubbier and a good deal more complacent than Henrietta recalled, in the days of her long, stormy courtship. She never had known what to make of that young scapegrace but Giles, poor wight, was obviously enslaved by her, and the best of luck to them. If Giles was anything like his father, it wouldn’t be the first and last, and a tribe of children would steady her down. From what Henrietta recalled of her, she needed steadying.
Deborah, and that nice young man Milton she had married, turned up on Christmas Eve to Adam's special delight, and Henrietta, calculating her age, wondered if it was too late now for her to present “proofs of affection” as they used to say. She hoped not. Any child those two produced was sure to be biddable, and they were clearly as pleased with one another as the besotted Giles and that sensual little baggage he had tracked down and married.
All in all it was less of a family than a clan, and she wished very much that Helen and her husband could have been here to complete the tally. She found herself hoping that the earnest young doctor who had come asking for her so unexpectedly (and at once whisked her off to Papua of all places) would soon have a change of heart, abandon what must surely be the unrewarding task of teaching headhunters the creed, and buy a nice, comfortable practice in Sevenoaks or Tonbridge.
She managed, in her way, to have a private word with most of them concerning Adam's latest obsession of converting Tryst into a beleaguered fortress. Their responses were interesting. Alex replied gravely that he supposed Father knew what he was about; he usually did, and invariably came up with a profit. George's response was more predictable. He said, lightly, “It’ll keep the Gov’nor out of mischief,” and she knew very well that this was precisely how he thought of it. He was the very last man in the network to want Adam turning up at the yard proffering unwanted advice.
Giles, the only one among them who shared Adam's interest in pictures, porcelain, and what Henrietta thought of as “secondhand furniture,” was enthusiastic, saying that none of them would know the place when it was tidied up and all the workmen had left. And here, to Henrietta's surprise, he was enthusiastically supported by Romayne, who said that Adam Swann was a very remarkable man in his way. She knew that, of course, and did not have to be reminded of it by a flighty daughter-in-law, but what surprised her much more was her daughter Stella's espousal of the changes. She remembered then that Stella had taken a lively interest in the landscaping during the summer and autumn, and had popped over to watch progress whenever Dewponds could spare her. Perhaps it wasn’t all that surprising. Stella had once helped to rebuild a burned-out farm with her own hands, thus emerging from her long trance after that frightful experience in Sussex. Maybe building something was a kind of medicine and Adam was now dosing himself, to ease the heartache caused by the surrender of his network.
She had a pleasant, gossipy session with the girls late on Christmas night, when the men were still at their port, the first time she could remember enjoying the segregation of the sexes the moment dinner was over, a custom she had always thought excessively dull and stupid.
She had a chance then to note that hardening of alliances between them, of a kind that had existed within the family before they began to scatter. Joanna seemed to confide in Romayne, and this was something else that made sense for they had, Henrietta thought, a good deal in common. One had been silly enough to get herself pregnant before she was safely married. The other had succumbed to panic and run off somewhere (Giles had never disclosed why, exactly) when her wedding day was a few weeks off. Stella and Gisela had formed a firm friendship a long time ago. Each approved the other's practical approach to men and marriage, although Gisela was never likely to influence George to the extent that Stella had moulded Denzil. Lydia, to a lesser degree, inclined towards this faction, whereas Margaret, her youngest daughter, who walked alone for the most part, had always looked upon Deborah as a special kind of person. More and more Henrietta began to see her youngest child as a female equivalent of the gentle old Colonel.
It was thinking of him that sent her out into the hall on the excuse of getting a breath of air. It was a very mild night for December, so she took a shawl and opened the front door, slipping out on to the forecourt and looking up at the stars. A merciful darkness shrouded the ugly diggings, contrasting with the blaze of lights that lit up the front of the house.
Standing here she could catch the sound of male laughter from the dining room, and supplementary giggles from the eastern end of the house. She had, at that moment, an awareness of intense personal achievement, telling herself that she was the source of all that health and vitality in there. Not for the first time she acknowledged it as a very remarkable accomplishment on her part, and one that, in the real sense, had been achieved single-handed. For what had Adam brought to it, apart from a few moments of zest and affection? He had kept them housed and fed and clothed, certainly, but all the really important decisions had been hers. It was she who had been the first to judge the effect Lydia would be likely to have upon Alex's character and his chances of promotion; she who had resurrected Stella and promoted the match with Denzil; and she who had intrigued to keep George inside the family circle. It was she who had extricated Joanna from her awful dilemma and she who had nursed the entire brood through all their turbulent patches. Now, she supposed, her influence would lessen year by year, but this was not a prospect that dismayed her. She would be fifty-one next birthday, and it was time to look about for a bit of peace, and perhaps some cautious foreign travel if she could talk Adam into breaking his resolve never to quit Britain again.
She felt extraordinarily happy and hopeful standing here inhaling the night air—almost as young and romantic as the girl who had waited outside tha
t shepherd's hut on Seddon Moor for her White Knight to ride over the skyline and hoist her on to the rump of his mare at the very beginning of the adventure. Remembering this, she felt a familiar surge of gratitude for the tall, dark-browed sixty-two-year-old, currently swapping coarse jokes, no doubt, with his buccaneering sons and sons-in-law. Acknowledgement of her affection for him was so definite that she looked forward to bedtime, when they would withdraw from all the chatter and badinage and put their arms about one another in that great Conyer bed they had shared since they settled here and their partnership had properly begun.
She took another look at the stars, sniffed the dampish air, drew her shawl about her, and marched back into the house, closing the door gently so that no one would scold her for exposing herself to the risk of catching cold. She rarely did catch cold. Apart from lying-in periods, she could not recall ever having spent a day abed and she still had—what?—twenty to thirty years ahead of her.
The drawing-room door opened while she was replacing her shawl in the cupboard and the men trooped out, a little the worse for wear some of them, but not Adam, who came last, his left hand flexing the muscles of his truncated leg, something he could always be seen to do when he had been seated for any length of time. The boys made for the sewing room in a body, and from the uproar that greeted them she concluded there would be any amount of private junketing when they finally separated and went to their beds, for all the girls save Margaret had had their share of hock and Burgundy at dinner.
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