by Mary Stewart
She was looking wildly from me to Con while she fought for breath to speak. Her eyes, her whole head, jerked from one to the other and back again, in a kind of distraction that was painful to watch.
‘Annabel . . . Con . . . Con . . .’
The appeal was whispered – the sick-room atmosphere, and whatever news Lisa had given her, had overborne her own distress – but if that distress, whatever it was had driven her to appeal to Con, then something was seriously the matter.
‘Julie!’ This time my movement towards her was protective. I came between her and the bed. ‘Darling! Whatever’s the matter?’
But something in the way I moved had got through to her. For the first time, she looked past me, fully, at the bed. I saw the shock hit her, as a stone hits a man who has been knocked half silly already. She wavered, bit her lip, and said, like a child who expects to be punished for behaving badly: ‘I didn’t know. Annabel, I didn’t know.’
I had an arm round her. ‘Yes, darling, I’m sorry. It happened just a few minutes ago. It was very sudden, and he seemed quite content. I’ll tell you about it later; it’s all right . . . If there’s something else wrong, you can tell us now. What is it? Something else has happened? Something’s wrong.’
She shook in my arms. She was trying to speak, but could only manage a whispered: ‘Could you – please – please – you and Con—’
It was apparent that there would be no sense out of her yet. I spoke across her, deliberately raising my voice to a normal pitch, and making it sound as matter-of-fact as I could: ‘Con, you’d better go down and tell Lisa, then would you telephone Dr Wilson? And you might get the brandy; Julie looks as if she needs it. Julie, don’t stay in here; come along to your own room—’
‘The phone’s off,’ said Julie.
‘Off?’
‘Lisa says so. It went off just now, she says. She’s been trying. It’ll be the ivy tree. When it came down—’
‘The ivy tree?’ This was Con.
I said: ‘The old tree by the Forrest lodge. That was what we heard come down. Never mind that. Julie—’
‘It sounded nearer. Are you sure it’s that one?’
‘It was split. It just split in two.’ Julie’s voice sounded thin and empty, but unsurprised, as if the questions were relevant enough. ‘Half came down right across the lodge, you see. It brought the rest of the roof down, and a wall, and—’
‘That’s nowhere near the telephone wires,’ said Con, ‘If that was all it was, there’s no real damage done.’
I said: ‘Shut up. This is something that matters. Go on, Julie.’ I gave her a little shake. ‘Julie! Con, for God’s sake go and get that brandy, the girl’s going to faint.’
‘There’s brandy here.’ He was at the bedside table. There was the splash and tinkle of liquid being poured, and he put a tumbler into my hand.
‘Here, drink this.’ I held the rim of Grandfather’s tumbler against her chattering teeth. Behind me I caught the movement as Con drew up the sheet to cover the old man’s face. The moment passed, almost without significance. I said sharply: ‘Julie, pull yourself together. What’s happened? Is it something to do with the ivy tree? Were you near the lodge when it – oh, my God, Con, she’d have been just about passing it when we heard it come down . . . Julie, is it Donald?’
She nodded, and then went on nodding, like a doll. ‘He’s down there. Underneath. Donald. The tree came down. It just split in two—’
‘Is he dead?’ asked Con.
Again, it seemed, his tactics worked better than mine. I felt the shock run through her, and her eyes jerked up to meet his. She said, sensibly enough: ‘No, I don’t think so, but he’s hurt, he can’t get out. We have to go . . . We were in the lodge, you see, and the wall came down when he went down the steps, and he’s hurt, there underneath. He can’t get out.’ Abruptly she thrust the back of one grimy hand against her mouth, as if to stifle a cry. ‘We – we’ll have to go.’ She looked in a kind of childish helplessness at the bed.
I said quickly: ‘He doesn’t need us, Julie. It’s all right. We’ll come now. Con, where’s the car?’
‘I – I brought Donald’s,’ began Julie, ‘only—’
Con said crisply: ‘You’re not fit to drive. Mine’s at the door. You’re certain the phone’s off?’
‘Yes. Lisa was trying again.’
‘Come on, then,’ I said, ‘quickly.’
It was odd – I spared a fleeting thought for it as we hurried to the door – how deeply conventions are ingrained in us. Scratch the conventional man and you find the savage; look closely at the primitive, and you see the grain of the wood from which our conventions are carved. It was incredibly hard to go out of that room in a hurry, with the mind bent on violent action. It seemed like desecration, yet only a few minutes ago this had merely been the bedroom of an arrogant, difficult, temperamental old man. By some inverted process the departure of his spirit from him had hallowed the room till, shrine-like, it had become a place where normally pitched voices and decisive actions seemed shocking.
As we reached the door, I glanced back. The sheeted shape, the single dimmed light, made of the bed a catafalque, and of the room something alien and remote. Outside was a wet night, and a fallen tree, and something urgent to do. There was no time, yet, to sit quietly, and think; either of the past, or how to meet the future. Everything has its mercies.
Lisa was in the hall, having apparently just come out of the office where the telephone was.
She stopped when she saw us. ‘I’ve been trying to get through, Julie. It’s definitely gone.’
Julie said: ‘Oh God,’ on a little sob, and stumbled, so that for a moment I thought she would pitch straight down the stairs. I gripped and held her.
‘Steady up. We’ll be there ourselves in a minute.’
Con, behind me, said surprisingly: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get him out.’ He ran down past us, and across the hall, pausing with a hand on the baize door. ‘Go and get into the car. Torches and brandy,’ Annabel, you know where they are. I’ll not be a minute. There’s some pieces of timber in the barn: we may need them if there’s any shoring-up to be done.’
The door swung shut behind him. We ran downstairs. I paused to ask Lisa: ‘Are any of the men still around?’
‘No. It’s Bates’s day off, and Jimmy left as soon as the milking was done. The others went when the rain started. There’s only Con here. You’d better go too, hadn’t you? I’ll go upstairs.’
‘Lisa—’ She guessed, as soon as I spoke; I saw it in her eyes. I nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so! just a few moments ago . . . But would you go up? It seems terrible just to – to run out like this.’
She said nothing. Her eyes took in my face with one of her queer, dispassionate glances, then Julie’s. Then she merely nodded, and crossed the hall towards the stairs. I think, in that moment, in spite of everything, I was sincerely and deeply glad I had come home. My own isolation was one thing; Grandfather’s had been another. That he had made it himself didn’t matter; he hadn’t cared, and Con had given him enough . . . but without me here, now, no one at Whitescar would have mourned him.
And, ironically enough, I was at the same time glad of Lisa, calm and impassive as ever, mounting the stairs to his room.
I pushed open the green baize door, and hustled Julie through it. ‘Hurry. I’ll bring the things. And don’t worry, Julie, pet, Con’ll look after him.’
It didn’t even strike me at the time that the tally of irony was complete.
The big Ford was there in the yard. We had hardly scrambled into it, both close together in the front seat, when Con appeared, a shadowy, purposeful figure laden with some short, solid chunks of timber that could have been thick fencing-posts, together with an axe and a ditcher’s spade. He heaved these into the back of the car, slid in behind the wheel, started the motor with a roar, and swung the car round in a lurching half-circle and through the yard gate all in a moment. The lights leaped out along the rising
track. Rain, small now but still thick enough and wetting, sparkled and lanced in the light. I realised that the storm had withdrawn already; the lightning was only a faint flicker away to the east, and the thunder was silent.
The track was muddy, and Con drove fast. The car took a rising bend at forty, lurched hair-raisingly across a deep rut, swung into a skid that took her sideways a full yard on to turf, hit a stone with a bouncing tyre, and was wrenched straight to pass between the posts of the first cattle-grid, with scarcely an inch to spare on the off side.
Con said abruptly: ‘What happened, Julie? Try to put us right in the picture: just where is he, how is he hurt, can we get to him?’
‘It’s the cellar,’ she said. ‘You know the place is a ruin; well, it had all fallen in where the old cellar stairs used to be, so they spent most of the day shifting that, and then—’
‘They?’ I said.
‘Yes. Mr Forrest had told Donald—’
‘Mr Forrest’s there?’
I thought my voice sounded quite ordinary, even flat, but I saw Con turn to look at me, and then away again. The car roared round a curve, slid a little on the clay bank-side, and then straightened up for the next grid. High Riggs now. At the edge of our lights the uncut fringe of hay along the track stood up like the crest of a horse, stiff and glittering under the light rain.
‘Yes,’ said Julie. ‘They’d been to the Hall cellars first – oh, well, never mind, but it turned out it was actually the cellars at the lodge—’
‘The Roman stones,’ I said. ‘Oh dear heaven, yes, of course, they were still looking?’
‘Yes, oh yes! When the ivy tree came down it brought down the chimney and most of that end wall, and the bit of the floor that those beams were holding. I – I was waiting outside, and—’
‘Is he hurt?’
‘I told you. He’s down in the—’
‘Adam Forrest. Is he hurt?’
‘I don’t know. But when the place came down they were both inside, and when I could get through the dust I tried to pull some of the stuff away from the cellar door, but Mr Forrest – he was inside – shouted for me to hurry and get help, because Donald was hurt, and not answering him, and he didn’t know how much because he hadn’t found the torch yet, and couldn’t get at him, and the stuff was settling. Con, the gate’s shut!’
The car had been mounting the hill with a rush like a lift. She reached the crest, topped it, and even as Julie cried out, the lights, shooting out level now, caught the gate full on. The bars seemed to leap up out of the dark, solid as a cliff-wall. Beyond, the headlamps lit a field of staring cattle.
Con jammed everything on, and the car seemed to dig in its hind wheels the way a jibbing horse digs in its hoofs, to come up all standing with her bonnet touching the bars.
Before we had stopped I was out of the car and wrenching at the stiff metal fastening. The gate went wide with a swing. As the car moved slowly forward Con, leaning out of his window, shouted: ‘Leave it! Get in quickly.’
I obeyed him, and even before the door was shut, we had gathered speed once more.
I said: ‘Con. The cattle. They’ll get through.’
‘The hell with that.’ I glanced at him in surprise. In the light from the dash I could see his face; it was preoccupied, and I thought it was only with the car: he was lost in the moment, in the driving, in holding the lurching, bouncing vehicle as fast as possible on an impossible road. Fast, violent action, a summons coming out of the dark like a fire alarm: that suited Con. Just as (I had had time to see it now) it suited him to save Donald; Donald would take Julie away.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ he was saying. ‘I was sure you’d have left the gate open, Julie.’
‘I – I came over the grid.’
‘But it’s broken.’
‘I know.’ She gave a little gulp that might either have been a laugh or a sob. ‘I – I broke something off the car. There was an awful bang. Donald’ll be livid with me . . . if he . . . if he—’
‘Hold up,’ I said sharply. ‘We’re nearly there.’
‘Is the top gate open?’ This from Con.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay,’ he said, and a moment later the Ford shot between the posts where the white gate swung wide, and skidded to a splashing halt in front of the looming, terrifying mass of debris that had been the ivy tree.
The lightning had split the great tree endways, so that it had literally fallen apart, one vast trunk coming down clear across the lane that led to the road, the other smashing straight down on to what had remained of the ruined lodge. It was the branches, not the trunk itself, that had actually hit the lodge, so that the masonry was not cleanly hacked through by one gigantic blow, but smashed and scattered by a dozen heavy limbs, and then almost buried from sight under the mass of tangled boughs and leaves, and the heavy, sour-smelling black mats of the ivy.
Con had swung the car slightly left-handed as it stopped, and he left the headlights on. They lit the scene with hard clarity; the huge clouded mass of the tree, its leaves glittering and dripping with the rain, among which the scattered masonry showed white: the raw new gash of the split trunk, where the black trail of the lightning could be clearly seen; and, sticking up through the boughs with a sickening kind of irrelevance, those fragments of the building that still stood. The surviving end wall and its chimney were intact, and half the front of the house, as far as the door with the heavy carved lintel, and the date, 1758 . . .
We thrust ourselves out of the car, and ran to the black gap of the doorway. In my haste I had only found one torch to bring, but there had been another in the car, and with this Con led the way through the doorway, where the car’s headlamps served only to throw deeper shadows. Inside the wrecked walls was a black chaos of smashed masonry and tangled wet boughs and splintered beams.
Con hesitated, but Julie pushed past him, one hand up to keep the whipping boughs from her eyes as she thrust through the debris that blocked the hallway.
She called: ‘Donald! Donald! Are you all right?’
It was Adam who answered her, his voice sounding muffled and strained. It came from somewhere to the left of the hallway and below it. ‘He’s all right. Have you brought help?’
‘Con and Annabel. Here. Con, they’re down here.’
Con had shoved after her, stooping under the barrier of one biggish branch, and was kneeling by what seemed in the torchlight to be a gap in the left-hand wall of the passage. I followed him. This was, I suppose, where the door to the cellars had stood. Now there was merely a hole through the shambles of broken masonry, not quite big enough to admit a man. It gave on darkness.
Con flashed the torch into the gap, lighting the flight of cellar steps.
Twelve steps led steeply downwards, looking undisturbed, and solid enough; at the bottom was a short length of stone-flagged passage which must have led to the cellar door. Now, the doorway had disappeared. Where it had been, was a pile of stones and rubble where the ceiling and one wall had collapsed, taking with them the splintered wreckage of the doorposts. But the crossbeam still held. It had fallen when the uprights collapsed, and was wedged now at an angle, within a foot or so of the floor, roofing a narrow, triangular gap of darkness which was the only way through to the cellar beyond. Above the beam pressed the weight of the broken wall, and the broken building above, all thrust down in their turn by the pressure of the fallen boughs. Stones were still falling here and there: I heard the patter of loose stuff somewhere; the other passage-wall showed a frightening bulge; and there was fresh dust dancing in the torchlight.
Adam was lying right underneath the beam, face downwards. His feet were towards us, and the top half of his body was out of sight. I recognised the faded brown corduroys, his working-garb, now thick with dust. For one sickening moment I thought that the great beam had fallen clean across his back, then I saw there was a gap of perhaps four inches between it and his body. He must have been somewhere on the cellar steps when the crash occurred, a
nd he had been trying to creep under the fallen stuff to reach the place where Donald lay.
And, for the moment, the crossbeam held.
‘Forrest?’ Con’s voice was subdued. A shout, it seemed, might bring the whole thing down, irrevocably in ruins. Even as he spoke, there was the slithering sound of something settling, and the whisper of dust chuting on to the steps below us. Somewhere, some timber creaked. I think it was only a broken bough of the ivy tree, but it lifted the hair along my arms. ‘Forrest?’ called Con softly. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m all right.’ Adam spoke breathlessly; it was as if he was making some violent effort, like holding up the beam with his own body; but he didn’t move. ‘Seton’s inside here; there’s another pile of the – stuff – just in here, past the beam, and I can’t – get any purchase – to move it. He’ll be safe enough . . . it’s a groined ceiling, it won’t come down in there, and he’s lying clear of this . . . I can just reach him if I lie flat, but I can’t get – any further – and we’ll not get him out till this stuff’s moved. How long will the doctor be?’
‘We couldn’t get him. The lines are down.’
‘Dear God. Didn’t Julie say—?’
‘Look, if Seton’s not badly hurt, you’ll simply have to leave him, and come out, for the time being.’ Con had propped his torch where it could light the gap, and was already, gingerly, beginning to widen this. ‘You say the roof’s safe over him; if you come back, we could probably shift enough stuff between us to get clear through to him. In any case, first things first, if this place isn’t shored up pretty damn quick, I wouldn’t give twopence for your own chances. That stuff’s settling while you wait.’
I heard Julie take in her breath. Adam said painfully: ‘My dear man, you’ll have to prop it round me as best you can, and take the chance. Otherwise it’s a certainty. I can’t leave him. He’s torn an artery.’
Beside me, Julie gave a little gasp like a moan. I said: ‘Julie! Get a way cleared back to the car, and fetch the props. Pass them to me under that bough.’