‘Twelve years old!’ exclaimed Grace. Was this then the child whose birth destroyed Grace’s first love affair? Once upon a time she would have turned away, but time had healed the wound. ‘I haven’t seen Andy for years,’ she said to Mrs Frith. ‘Ask him to come up tomorrow and say hello?’
Smiling at Jeanette, she spoke to her in French and was rewarded with a smile. She was not an attractive girl, and there seemed no trace of Andy in her dark hair and sharp features. If I’d married Andy, thought Grace, what sort of daughter would I have had? She only just managed to restrain herself from asking the question out loud.
Curiously, the query failed to arouse her interest. It came as a new thought that she did not particularly like children and had no wish at all to have any of her own. There was excitement in independence. To be tied by the demands of babies and young children must be an unbearable imposition.
Had she married, she would have raised a family as a matter of course and might never have discovered the pleasures of being her own mistress. Not for the first time, she recognized how her own mother’s life had been shaped by the burden of child-bearing and child-raising. What a fortunate escape she had had herself!
When everything that could be done in advance was ready, she went upstairs to dress. The frock she put on had been made by her mother out of a length of silk bought in Shanghai. Jay and Aunt Midge would recognize it as being five years old, but David and Sheila would never have seen it before. Its dropped waist flattered her slim figure, the pleated hem shimmered in the sunlight and the jewelled colours of the fabric made a dramatic contrast with her pale skin. Carefully she eased her feet into her only silk stockings and a pair of patent leather shoes borrowed from her mother.
‘Fancy dress party!’ she exclaimed aloud to herself and laughed with amusement. Walking with care, because she was unused to high heels, she made her way down the spiral staircase of the tower.
Her mother and Philip were still upstairs, dressing themselves for the occasion, but Mrs Frith was on duty to open the front door and announce the visitors. Grace stood for a moment in the doorway of the drawing room, stroking her silk dress with her fingers. Then she sat down to wait: the mistress of Greystones, ready to receive her guests.
Chapter Two
‘To Grace!’
Midge and Will Witney had brought vintage champagne as a birthday gift, and it was Will who proposed the birthday toast at the end of a magnificent meal.
Except for the youngest of David’s three children, imprisoned in the high chair which had last been used by Jay, they all stood up, murmuring congratulations. Only David showed by an extra comment that the rift between them had still not quite healed. ‘Not that I suppose you’ll ever admit to being thirty, Grace. I’ve noticed that young women, especially spinsters, seem to remain twenty-nine for quite a long time.’ He lifted his glass again and smiled as though this would take the sting out of his words.
Grace stared at him for a moment before tucking the remark away at the back of her mind, to be considered later. ‘Shall we have coffee on the terrace?’ she said. ‘And then, who would like a game of croquet?’
After the game Midge and Will were happy to sit with Lucy in the sunshine and Sheila took little Peter upstairs for a rest. Grace and Jay accepted David’s suggestion of a walk in the grounds, to show his elder children, John and Lilian, where he had played as a boy.
‘There were no sheep in the meadow then,’ he told them. ‘We used to play football here, and cricket. That was when we were older, and had started school. When we were young, we were allowed to run wild in the wood and by the stream.’
He showed the way and the children ran on ahead, shouting with pleasure.
‘What did you play here?’ asked John as they entered the wood. It was tidier now than in the old days, because Philip chopped any fallen or dead wood to feed the log fires in the house. Even in her best silk stockings, Grace was willing to accompany them.
‘All sorts of things,’ David told the eight-year-old. ‘Hide and seek, of course. And we had bows and arrows. Sometimes we played Robin Hood. Once, I remember, we pretended to have a tiger hunt and got a bit carried away. We killed a cat – Aunt Grace’s cat.’ He looked around and recognized the two pointed ears of slate which marked Pepper’s grave. ‘This is where it’s buried. It was a very sad accident. A great pity.’
He looked straight at Grace, who was too astonished to react. Never once in the twenty-four years since Pepper’s death had David made any reference to it. Was this, at long last, an attempt at an apology? But even now he had said ‘We’, not ‘I’.
Without listening any more to the words, she watched the children questioning their father about the cat. Choosing the two pieces of slate had represented her first realization that shapes were important and could even represent ideas. At the age of six she could not have expressed her thoughts so pretentiously; but it was true, all the same, that Pepper’s death had introduced her to the most important activity in her life. Perhaps she ought really to be grateful to David!
The same occasion, besides causing a still unhealed rift between herself and David, had changed the course of Kenneth’s life. Or had it merely brought to the surface a side of his character which would have revealed itself sooner or later? Kenneth’s compassion, like Frank’s talent for leadership, Jay’s love of pretence and her own feeling for form, seemed all to have sprung from a single moment of drama, but the seeds must already have been sown before the accident of Pepper’s death.
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Jay, handsome and selfassured as he walked beside her.
‘I was thinking about you.’ She smiled and took his arm, turning back towards the house. ‘Tell me about your new part.’
‘Not so much a part as a series of turns. Nothing in a revue lasts more than about three minutes. But I have got one recurring act as an old man of eighty. A kind of running joke. Ridiculous, isn’t it? A fine upstanding youth like me, perfect material for juvenile leads, playing grandfather.’ His back hunched, his hands began to tremble and an invisible walking stick supported his shuffling steps. ‘But that,’ he said in a quavering old man’s voice, ‘can’t be what you were thinking about.’
‘No. I was remembering – it was the day you first told me that you wanted to be an actor. That you were an actor, whether or not you ever got on stage to prove it. You had a great theory, I remember. Happiness comes when what you do is the expression of what you are. Or something like that.’
‘I was a very perceptive little boy, though I say it myself.’ Jay straightened up and the eighty-year-old disappeared. ‘The theory stands the test of time. Though who’d have guessed then that what was lurking in you was the soul of a farmer.’
‘No!’ protested Grace, astonished that he should see her so wrongly.
‘But you’re happy. I can see it. Grace Hardie, spinster of this parish; a horny-handed daughter of toil and happy with it. Just remember, though, that it’s only in fairy stories that anyone lives happily ever after. In real life, a happy ending only lasts until tomorrow.’
‘For you, perhaps.’ Grace had been told often enough by her brother that acting was an insecure profession. But she was in no mood to argue. She might have explained to him her amazement that everything which had happened in her life seemed designed to point her in a single direction. But part of her satisfaction lay in the private nature of her work, and the fact that no one guessed how much it meant to her; so she ignored any discussion of happiness and thought about his other point instead.
‘It’s odd, this spinster business,’ she said. ‘It’s a word which sounds as though everyone looks down on you. As though you’ve somehow failed in life. Nobody but a heartless brother would ever dare to use such a word in my hearing. Why is it so different from “bachelor”, d’you think? Why are spinsters always pitied and bachelors always envied?’
‘A bachelor gay am I!’ Jay was never one to miss a cue and would have performed the complete song ha
d his sister not shaken him into silence.
‘I was thinking about that earlier, when Aunt Midge arrived,’ she went on. ‘When I was a girl – when Aunt Midge was a headmistress – I admired her enormously. To go to university and pass all those examinations and have such an important job and earn money and be in charge of her own life – if that was being a spinster, then I only wished that I had the talent to be a spinster as well. But since her marriage – well, she’s somehow become just an ordinary person. Still great fun to be with and talk to; but there’s nothing special about her any longer. Don’t you feel that?’
‘It’s just that she’s old now.’ To Jay, anyone over forty was old, and his aunt was sixty-two. ‘Just as you are, pretty well. Thirty.’
‘Thank you so much for cheering me up,’ said Grace, but she laughed as merrily as her brother. Jay was quite right. She was happy.
That evening, after the visitors had gone and the silver had been put back into its felt bags and locked away, Philip and his mother both went early to bed. It was not just the exertions of the day which had tired them, but the society; for they were not used to so much conversation. Grace, though, was too restless to sleep. She let herself quietly out of the house and for a second time that day made her way through Philip’s garden.
This time, with no flowers to cut, she could lift her eyes to the great house higher up the hill instead of looking for the most perfect roses. No lights burned in its windows, and the rising slope behind it masked part of its outline, but there was sufficient moonlight to show the silhouette of Grace’s tower.
By now she knew the reason why the tower – and, indeed, the whole house – had been built. Her mother, on returning from China, had willingly answered questions, describing the anxiety which an elderly aristocrat had once felt for a bright-eyed but asthmatic child.
‘Thank you, great-grandfather,’ said Grace aloud. He had wondered what would become of her, but had not lived to find out.
‘A sort of farmer indeed!’ she exclaimed. Had Jay never understood that all the ways in which she and Philip earned money from the land had never been more than expedients which would allow them to go on living in the house they loved? They had done well enough, although the top storey, where the servants had once slept, was now damp and the whole building needed redecoration. At least their success gave them the freedom to lead the lives they wanted to lead. Philip had inherited his father’s passion for breeding new plants, whilst Grace herself… She smiled in contentment and began to walk back up the serpentine way, this time pausing to touch each of her carvings in turn.
Reaching the house, she groped her way towards the studio and lit one of the five lanterns which were suspended in a circle round her bench. Slipping off her silk dress and stockings, so that they should not spoil, she began to stroke the piece of polished walnut on which she had been working for the past week. Her fingers moved lightly over the parts which were already taking form, and pressed harder where the wood must be cut away.
‘Just ten minutes!’ she said, picking up a fluter and setting to work. Without being aware of it, she continued to talk – either to herself or to the walnut – as the shavings began to fall to the ground.
‘A sort of farmer!’ Jay’s phrase still amused her. Still speaking aloud, she set him right. ‘Grace Hardie, spinster and carver of shapes.’
Jay had been right to recognize that she was happy, but wrong to fear that’ tomorrow, or any of the days after tomorrow, would bring any surprises to disturb her. She was a princess in a palace, with no wish to be disturbed by any Prince Charming; and she was living happily ever after.
A Note on the Author
Anne Melville is a pseudonym of Margaret Potter (1926–1998), a daughter of the author and lecturer Bernard Newman. She read Modern History at Oxford as a scholar of St Hugh’s College, and after graduating she taught and travelled in the Middle East. On returning to England, she edited a children’s magazine for a few years, but later devoted all her working time to writing.
Discover books by Anne Melville published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/AnneMelville
Lorimers at War
Lorimers in Love
Lorimer Loyalties
The Last of the Lorimers
The Lorimer Legacy
The Lorimer Line
The House of Hardie
Grace Hardie
The Hardie Inheritance
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc,
50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Grafton Books
Copyright © 1988 Anne Melville
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eISBN: 9781448214389
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Grace Hardie Page 29