by Sheila Burns
‘But Simon, we share life, we believe in each other, and we must share.’ That was her simple creed, childlike perhaps, but she believed in it.
‘I know, but not this life. This is my life alone, and being alone is the way I want it to be. Run home now, I shan’t be long, and I’m in no danger.’ He kissed her lightly; his lips were stone cold. Then he turned her body round so that she faced the grim square house against the skyline.
‘I don’t want to go back, that woman keeps crying.’
‘You’re being absurd. I told you that when the wind was a certain way that always happened.’
‘There is no wind tonight. It can’t be the wind when it isn’t there. I ‒ I daren’t go back,’ and she herself was crying.
He took her hand as though she were a little child, and led her silently back. Not a word was exchanged between them, and if he had scolded her she would have felt better about it, but he said nothing at all. They entered the house and it was ghostly still. Not a sound went through it; the hall struck pleasantly warm, and the big chandelier on the landing sent down a glowing golden light on them as they entered. It was comforting.
Simon said, ‘Now you run up to bed. I may be a long time yet, don’t keep awake for me.’ She went up the beautiful staircase, and turned into her own room. She undressed, sobbing a little. She had a warm bath, for it had been quite cold out there on the cliffs and she had been shivering. She came back into the bedroom and got into bed, where her sobbing quietened. The warmth was comforting and she realised that she was far more tired than she had thought. She could feel herself nodding off.
Some long time afterwards she came back to consciousness and knew that Simon had not come in. Faintly, far away in the distance, there was the sound of a woman weeping.
Chapter Nine
Along the cliff towards where Fiddler’s Hill began to swoop down to the small town below, there was the bungalow which was so prettily thatched. Lindy noticed it every time she walked that way.
Lindy admired the bungalow. The garden was beautifully designed and kept up, and every time she went past it more and more flowers seemed to be there. She noticed the owner, a man who would be about thirty-eight, she imagined, with dark hair and eyes, not too tall, with a stiff leg. When she asked Simon about him he told her that his name was Ronald Forbes, he had injured his leg in a car accident, and was quite a famous artist.
‘Look out, for he is sure to want to paint you,’ was what Simon said.
‘You know him?’ she asked.
‘We’re on speaking terms, nothing much more. He has a studio at the back of his bungalow and spends most of his life in it.’
Just after the night when Simon had been so strange ‒ or had she imagined it? for she was quite ready to blame herself ‒ she met Ronald Forbes. He was standing by the gate and smiled at her as she drew level.
He said, ‘I can see that you like flowers, come around my garden, do?’
‘I’d love it.’
He was extremely pleasant. At his temples there was the first sign of greyness coming, threading in with the darkness.
The garden was far more interesting than she had expected. He had a mass of dwarf irises, a flower which had always attracted her. He had rock roses. He took her round, knowledgeable about flowers, interested in colour, and very kind.
He said, ‘You are Lady Leeson, married three weeks? How do you like Fiddler’s Hill?’
‘I love it, it’s a marvellous house.’
‘A house with a story.’ So he knew that, did he? As she made no answer he went on. ‘When I came here it was a ruin and I used to climb about it. I never thought that anyone would build it up again, and I admire your husband for what he did.’
‘Simon adores it. I think when he makes up his mind he just goes on until he accomplishes what he wants to do. If you have the persistence, perhaps it is easy?’
‘Yes, perhaps.’
‘You’ve been over it since it was done?’
‘Part of it, yes, no more.’
‘Come round and have a drink, and go over all of it.’
‘I’d like that,’ then came what Simon had predicted. ‘One of these days I’d love to paint you. I have a thing about light red hair. Like montbretias.’
‘Somebody else said that once. I’d love to be painted,’ and she knew that she glowed with the complimentary idea. ‘But I’d have to ask Simon.’
‘Let me come around and ask him for you? I have hardly spoken to him, but I hear that he is a strong silent man.’
‘Oh no, he is never that. He has quiet moments, of course, but usually he is so gay and merry. It was his gaiety which attracted me so much to him at first.’
‘Maybe you have been such a short time married that you see him with different eyes,’ and his dark eyes smiled. He stood watching her.
She refused to answer that. ‘Come and meet Simon in his own house this evening.’
‘Shall I?’
‘Please.’
When she got home and told Simon he flung back his head and laughed.
‘So that’s what he’s after, is it? Other men’s property! Well, well, well!’ and he laughed again. ‘Put on your prettiest dress tonight, Lindy, and give him a treat. I shall be most amused watching how it goes. Look lovely, though it is hard for you to look anything else. Maybe I mean look lovelier still.’
He wasn’t jealous. Walking back, she had felt a faint pang dart through her, with the sharpness of a blade, for she had wondered if he were the jealous kind. Really she knew so little about Simon, but she was beginning to understand him better, to know him well, and to love him all the more for that.
Perhaps she should have waited until she knew him better (Alan and Mrs. Burman had said so), for better knowledge of the man you marry is perhaps necessary to happy marriage. But she had not waited; Lindy had loved him so much that she had believed that nothing else mattered in the whole world. Nothing! She had been swept along in the ecstasies of life’s high tide.
Strange questions had reared themselves in her heart like seeds in a May time garden. She did not understand when Simon, so generous, so warm and so understanding, could suddenly turn cold as ice. But when he wandered off because he wanted to be alone, he had things to think about, and had always been this way; she must learn to live with it. That night away; where had he been that night? she was asking herself, and gathered that she would never know the answer.
Because she dared not approach him she came no nearer to a solution. Simon, the warm kind man, could be a coldly accusing man, and when she questioned him, he instantly chilled.
I have got to be patient, Lindy thought.
One day when she sat writing a letter at the bureau in the octagon-shaped dining-room, Davies came into the room to dust. He was ever a chatty man and paused before the picture.
‘Who is the lady in the portrait, m’Lady?’
‘She was the second Lady Leeson.’
‘The second?’
‘Sir Simon has been married twice before.’
‘Well, I never!’
Perhaps Lindy should not have said that for anyway she had never counted poor Marigold in Simon’s life. She had left no lasting mark on him. He had married her for pity and she had died soon after in his arms. Lindy knew that Edna had been a very different story.
‘I wouldn’t trust that one with the change, m’Lady,’ and Davies grinned. Somehow she was ashamed to be congratulating herself that Davies also was uneasy about Edna.
‘I think she’s very pretty.’
‘Yes, m’Lady, all that, but crafty, I bet. She knows what’s what. She knows everythink.’ He paused, then became blandly enquiring. ‘She died, did she?’
‘Yes, she was killed in a ghastly train smash in the States.’
‘Poor lady. You wouldn’t have thought it.’
She felt strangely uncomfortable whenever she spoke of Edna, half afraid, which was absurd, suspicious, which was more absurd, and within her there was ever the
feeling that a ghost plucked at her sleeve, the ghost of Fiddler’s Hill.
In a way she felt that this had not shocked Simon, even though he loathed her referring to it. Now, she thought, I must draw a curtain on both Marigold and Edna; Marigold whom he pitied, Edna whom at times I feel he almost hated. She glanced again at the picture over the mantelpiece. The eyes searched her half defiantly. Those arms were almost akimbo, the hands dug into the trousers pockets, and about her there was that look of contempt, a look which some beautiful women get. The eyes said, ‘You’ve got him now. You think you’ve got everything that once was mine. Wait!’
I must not think about these things, she thought, and again the fear struck her and turned her cold.
‘Poor thing, she’s dead now, and she must have died in a quite dreadful way. I hope she knew nothing about it.’
‘Ah! That makes you think, don’t it?’ and he went on dusting hard.
When Ronald Forbes came in for a drink he was very late. This was irritating for Mrs. Baker disliked her dinners being upset. She had an old husband to whom she returned after finishing the meal, but realising that good cooks were worth their weight in gold, Lindy kept on the right side of Mrs. Baker. She agreed with any menu the cook suggested rather than argue. In a way her age and her extremely youthful appearance made her an outsider here. She was too young to lay down the law, she could not give orders to someone established as Mrs. Baker was.
Once Simon had asked her why she was so placid when it was her own house and she was here to give the orders?
‘I’d rather she did it all, anyway at first. I’m new to it all.’
‘But why not ask for what you want? You like cream buns, why not have them every day?’
‘Because they are an awful nuisance to make.’
‘Darling, I’m not paying Mrs. Baker to be here for her own personal amusement, nor to have a good time. I want her to do what we want.’ Then, perhaps because he saw how forlorn she looked, and appreciated that she was nothing but a child at heart, a child in love, he let it pass.
When Ronald arrived he was prepared to make an evening of it. They had to ask him to stay to dinner as he had come so late. He made no bones about it and accepted eagerly.
Lindy was a little dismayed by his casualness. Over vichyssoise, scampi, roast duck and green peas, he gave them his own feelings about the seaside town. This part of it being aloof, perched on Fiddler’s Hill, and with that strip of land separating them from the main part of the town, which was something of an isthmus, they felt that they were in a different position.
He said that Ralph Cooper at the rectory was a religious mutt, married to Elisabeth who was cold as a cucumber and went in for sculpture. Nowadays she did not do much in that line for the chores kept her busy, but every now and then one heard her ‘hacking away’, you’d really have thought it wasn’t the right sort of work for women. How she had ever taken it up, he couldn’t think.
There was Felix Archer, the doctor, who had never married, which he felt was a mistake for a medical man. The women had run after him when he had first come to the place, but after seven years of it they had decided that he wasn’t going to marry any of them, and it looked as if they had given it up.
Joan Headley was the nicest person in the place. She had a little money, and had built herself a house here. She was on the Bench and liked it, for she was an understanding woman, and he could not think why she had not married.
‘Well, you’re not married. Perhaps you are the chap she’s waiting for!’ said Simon.
‘She could be my mother, I should think, a young mother, I grant you, but my mother all the same.’
Somehow Lindy liked the name Joan Headley, and from what he said was left with a picture of her. A big woman, with very appealing eyes, so Ronald said (he had always wanted to paint them), a woman who understood, whom one could trust.
It was a changing community of people who lived in Alderson Point; most of them let their places in summer, returning when the days began to shorten, and complaining that the winter and spring were always so bitterly cold there.
As he ended she glanced across the room to the picture of that other wife. Edna’s eyes, which had that strange light purple of the irises in them, were watching her. The mouth had a cynicism which was not good in anyone so young. She would have been what age? Twenty-five at the most. Surely not more?
Once she had asked her husband ‘How old was Edna?’ and he had replied almost gruffly ‘I don’t want to talk about her, she was older than you are, of course.’
Marigold had been nineteen, he seldom spoke of her, but Edna always made him angry. Had they been so unhappy together that he hated to be reminded of it? Lindy thought so. Lindy got the feeling that if Marigold had haunted the house it would have been with a gentle sweetness, but Edna was a dominant personality. Marigold had been grateful for his kindness, thankful to die in his arms. Edna was another proposition. Lindy felt that about her there was something that was malignant and revengeful, something that was no soft memory which lingered romantically, but was far more formidable. Edna was still dangerous.
Lindy had thought when she first came that the sound of the woman crying was that of Edna, now she did not think so. Mrs. Baker always referred to her as ‘the other lady’, and she had gathered from Mrs. Baker’s tone of voice that she had not liked her.
After dinner they went into the drawing-room to give Mrs. Baker and Ethel the chance to clear up. The coffee was beautiful, liqueurs perfect, for Simon kept a good cellar and knew a lot about wines.
It was then that Ronald spoke of the woman who cried. The room was rather dimly lit, Simon liked it that way so that he could see the lights of ships at sea moving faintly through that light grey mistiness of water and air which lay beyond the windows.
This was the first time that Lindy had had the chance to speak of it, and Ronald happened to mention it at the moment when Simon had been called away to the telephone in his own room.
‘You know about her, the woman who weeps, I mean?’ said Ronald, ‘but then everyone does.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘They say she was here in James the Second’s time, when the fear of war with the Dutch was going strong. Her lover, a Dutchman, was imprisoned here. You’ve seen the cellars, of course?’
She hadn’t, but did not say so. ‘They kept the prisoners until they could get sufficient to make it worth while to cart them along to Colchester for trial and execution. You could take it as a cert that they would all die …’
‘But surely if they were tried …?’
‘They had a funny idea about a just trial in those days. Being a Dutchman was crime enough, if you ask me. It was said that she was unfaithful to her husband and tried to get the prisoner away. Both of them were caught.’
‘What a horrible story!’
‘Nobody told you about it? But I thought everyone knew. Surely Simon told you?’
‘He told me nothing.’
Simon returned.
He sat down, not mentioning what had called him away but he seemed to be inwardly disturbed. Again she felt the sinister warning that something was wrong. Again she felt that ghost plucking at her own sleeve. He had ideas for coping with the wild land which lay beyond Fiddler’s Hill, though every year more and more of the earthy cliffs slipped away down into the sea, and he admitted that the spit of pastureland narrowed.
‘Time will lose the lot for you,’ Ronald said. ‘One day this house will go, my bungalow too, I suppose. Into the sea at some strange high tide which filches everything. They have told me that it was miles wide once, and there was a village here.’
‘There was. About thirty houses.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ Lindy said.
In the end she let them go on talking and slipped away from them. The last faint light stayed, for the days died more slowly now, and she went to her room to touch up her face. Half of me loves this house, and half of me fears it, she thought, and did not k
now why. How could there be fear? surely only the presentiment of evil and a warning in her heart?
But she loved Simon, loved him with warmth, a high floodtide of the great emotion, a love that was almost too big for her. Too engulfing. It was so big that it commanded her.
I am the luckiest girl in all the world, she told herself, and one day I shall understand why he turns broody and gets these cold moments and goes off and wants to be alone. Already she was learning. In the first few weeks of her happy marriage she too could go quiet, let him be, and never ask the questions which were burning within her.
Later, when Ronald had gone, she gathered that he must have said something which worried Simon, for he had that look on his face and said he was taking the spaniels for a walk and might not be in for a bit. She went up to bed, and he did not come. She woke at one in the morning and he was not there. Beyond the open window she knew that the wind had got up and was moaning a little round the house, and she heard the woman crying.
She wanted to go to sleep again to shut out the sound of the woman, but she could not shut out that sound. She lay there listening, not desperately afraid, just mildly worried, but listening.
The hall clock with the Westminster chimes was striking three in the morning when Simon came in. He made no noise for he was an understanding man, and he went to bed in his dressing-room. But she had heard him. It was disappointing that he had not come in to her, for this would have been the time to talk and perhaps get down to the root of the trouble. He had not given her the chance.
She lay there sleepless for quite a time.
We are both crying, she thought, and possibly about the same thing. What is the matter with this place?
Chapter Ten
The summer came, and it was glorious.
It came early that year when there was the smother of may in the hedgerows and the ecstasy of the first lilacs. The garden was looking utterly charming, she had the tremendous joy of picking her own flowers and arranging them.