by Iona Whishaw
The path was slightly overgrown but it seemed nevertheless to be an old and well-used one, where two could have walked abreast for much of it. It wound downhill and then it met another path that climbed gently toward an opening in the woods. She came out of the trees and was at the edge of a meadow that was alive with fluttering and buzzing insects. Swallows swooped around her out of nowhere as she crossed, skimming through the grass as if they were there to guide her way. Throwing her arms out, she turned and turned, drinking in the warmth and smell of grass and wildflowers, and the intense blissful green silence held in by the forest surround. The path came out through a little border of trees onto the road, she saw the expanded and modernized Bertolli cabin come into view. She came off the path on to the road and walked another fifty yards to their long, winding driveway. Dogs immediately began to give the alarm. She was about to take the whole trip around the driveway when she saw that a little diagonal trail cut directly up to the house. She could hear David shouting, “Shut up, will you?” and Angela saying, “Dave, don’t say shut up. The children will learn it,” and then from her, “Oh, do shut up, it’s only Lane. Lane! Come on up. Don’t mind them. I’d be more worried about being bitten by the children than the dogs!”
Lunch was served at a picnic table on the porch. The children, Philip, Rolfie, and Rafe, were allowed to eat in their treehouse just off the kitchen door, and so the grownups sat in perfect contentment eating lovely chicken broth for starters and then chicken salad sandwiches, with a bottle of French wine.
“This is wonderful. I can’t quite get used to all the lovely food after years of Spam in my little bedsit. Where did you get this wine? It’s heavenly!” Lane said, leaning happily on one elbow, her plate moved to one side. She looked up at the tops of the trees that provided the shade they were enjoying on the porch.
Dave said, “Consider yourself very much honoured. I brought that one out from New York when we moved here. We never had an occasion before now.”
Lane had sat up and was about to say, “Well, I am honoured,” when a shot rang out.
The dogs leaped into action, and the children began shouting in high-pitched voices, “What’s that, Mommy?”
Dave jumped up and took Lane and his wife by the arm and half-dragged them to the door. “Go on! Into the house! Keep down. I’ll get the children.”
There was another shot that caused Lane to duck automatically and plunge, bent to half her height, into the open door to the living room. Dave had gone around to the other side of the house and she could hear him somehow over the near-hysterical barking of the dogs, exhorting the boys to hurry. Angela knelt on her hands and knees and called out the door to the dogs. “Come on, you stupid mutts! Lassie, stop that racket and get in here!”
Eventually the dogs were got in and shut into the kitchen, where they continued to bark and hurl themselves at the kitchen door. The humans were sitting on the floor against the wall with their feet stretched out before them. There was another shot that sounded as if the shooter had covered a good deal of distance since the first shot, and the direction was toward them.
“For God’s sake, Dave, what is it? Can you just peek over the window and see?”
“Thank you very much!” he said acerbically, but he turned and slowly put his head up to the window and then he shot back down with an oath. “It’s that bloody Mrs. Mather! She’s got a rifle and pair of rubber boots and she is shooting right on our driveway. I should have known. She’s as crazy as coot, that one!”
Angela closed her eyes for a moment in something like exasperation. “This is not the first time, I’m sorry to say, though she was not shooting right in our yard last time. Last time it was in the forest. She claimed she was hunting. Dave, phone Reginald. He’ll know what to do. I’m going to check on the boys.” The boys had been sent upstairs to their room, which was on the other side of the house with a window that looked out on a downward sweep of heavy brush and trees. They could be heard playing with their Dinky cars on the floor, as if gunfire were par for the course, like the barking dogs and their mother’s enthusiasms.
Angela hurried on her hands and knees to the stairs while Dave crawled into the hall to the telephone. “What’s Reginald again?” he called after his wife.
“Four-four-seven.”
Dave, safely in the hall, sat at the little hall table and dialled. “Sandy? Is that you? Is Reginald there? Oh. Listen, your mother is over here with a rifle. She’s shooting rather close to the house. I’m not sure why, no. Yes. Oh, I see. Well, we’re worried about the boys and we can’t really go out of the house. All right. Thanks very much.”
He slid back on to the floor with Lane and pulled the bottle of wine toward them, offering her another drink. Angela came and flopped down next to them. Another blast from the rifle shattered her next sentence, which ended, “. . . very quiet for a change.”
“Sandy’s coming over. He says Reg is out somewhere.”
“Honestly, it sounds like she’ll be on the porch in a minute,” Angela said.
Lane realized they’d been having to speak loudly the whole time because the dogs had kept up a steady protest in the kitchen since the beginning of the drama. This suddenly became louder and more intense and they could hear a car approach, turn in to their driveway, and stop.
“Come on, Mother,” they heard through the open window.
“Cougar. Came right through our garden and along here. The Yanks have children, you know.”
“Yes. I know. I’m sure they’ll send you a thank-you card. Give me that. Thank you, now hop in and I’ll make you a cup of tea at home.”
Mrs. Mather said something else, but it was lost as she disappeared into the car. The door slammed and in a few seconds they could hear the grinding sound of a car being backed down the narrow driveway to the road.
The lunchers sat for a few minutes in the silence that followed this interaction. The dogs had stopped barking and had settled with an audible humph against the door of the kitchen. Lane suddenly realized that there were lovely paintings on the wall. They appeared to be scenes of farming country, and great trees casting shade across a green landscape. Angela’s, she supposed. Finally, Dave spoke, “I brought a case of that wine with me. I think we’d better open another bottle. I had been saving it for an occasion, but I don’t think it could get much more occasionally than this, do you?”
Later, Dave drove her home against only the weakest protests. Between the admittedly defused danger of being shot by Mrs. Mather and the possibility of meeting a cougar, Lane felt, she had to confess, considerably less brave about the journey home.
CHAPTER FOUR
“YOU KNOW, JUST OUT HERE there’s a path that runs up the hill to that fantastic villa of the Hughes’ behind us here. You should go up and see the place. Her garden is enormous, and I’m sure they’d be very pleased. They were perhaps slightly put off that they hadn’t got to speak to you much at the vicar’s tea.” It was the day after the exciting lunch with Angela, and Eleanor Armstrong was leaning on the wooden counter of her post cubby. Today it had been sweet peas to make up for there being nothing for Lane in the post.
“I do feel bad about that. I didn’t get much of chance, with Sandy hanging about. I sat with them for only a few moments, resplendent in their flowered frocks. I’d like to go see them, though I cannot imagine they have a garden more wonderful than yours!”
“My dear, there’s three of them at it all the time and they’ve got a much bigger space. They also keep chickens. We get our eggs from them. They’re quite self-sustaining, that trio. Only one of them drives, Mabel, and they all get into those frocks and go off to town every couple of weeks to get a few supplies. Otherwise they wear trousers and Wellingtons every day but Sunday.”
“Why are there no men?” asked Lane, though instantly felt it an inappropriate question, especially given her own status. “Sorry. None of my business!”
“Oh, quite all right, my dear. It’s only me you’re talking to! It’s the usu
al sad tale, I’m afraid. The old lady’s husband died in 1910, of a heart attack. Homesteading in the eighties was very difficult, and I think he just got tired, poor man. Gwen was engaged to Kenny’s poor younger brother John.” She paused for a moment and then sighed. “Mabel never did seem to find anyone. They’re really quite plucky, the three of them. The old lady must be seventy-five if she’s a day.”
Lane walked home deep in thought about the effect of war on women and then moved on to the effect of war on people in general. Everyone at King’s Cove seemed affected somehow by this sense of loss. It made people variously strong and dignified, like the Armstrongs, who had lost a brother, or bitter like Harris. The people who didn’t have wars, she decided, could never bridge that gulf of understanding, not really. The Bertollis seemed just a layer lighter than herself.
The sweet peas looked delighted to be in a deep blue, glass vase she had brought from Riga before the war that had somehow survived her wandering course across the world. She wasn’t given to nostalgia, but she stroked the rounded bowl of the vase lightly with her fingers when she arranged it in the centre of her kitchen table.
“Right,” she said out loud and looked about for what she might bring to the Hughes’ house. She had an extra box of English biscuits for tea; they were chocolate-covered fingers and she decided that even self-sufficient ladies who mined their own tea and cookies from the forest would like chocolate.
She put on a clean blouse and, box of biscuits in hand, set off back toward the post office so that she might use the path, as yet unexplored by her, that went up the hill behind their house to the Hughes’. She arrived at the edge of the property quite breathless from both the climb and the sudden beauty before her, looking at a large, rambling wood-frame house painted a deep, old-fashioned green with rich cream trim on the many window and dormer frames. A lawn that seemed endless meandered like a green river around flowerbeds of every shape; islands of riotous colour. Would she ever have a garden like this? Not bloody likely, she decided. A pair of small cocker spaniels came up and sniffed around her feet but, amazingly, did not bark. Finally, one of them trotted away and gave a couple of yaps, as if to say, “We have a visitor, you’d better come along!”
Lane stooped down and patted the head of the remaining creature and then she heard a grizzled female voice halloo-ing. She looked up to see the tall, stringy, elderly woman whom Lane recognized as the Hughes mater, dressed, as Eleanor had said she would be, in baggy, ancient blue trousers and a pair of Wellington boots. She was removing her gardening gloves as she approached, striding with a litheness and speed that completely belied her age. “Hello!” she called out. “Come along, we were about to take a break. We’ve got some tea on the brew, I think. The girls will have that in hand.”
Lane was ushered in through the kitchen screen door to greet the “girls,” Gwen and Mabel, both of whom looked very nearly the age of their mother, Gladys, and were dressed in trousers as well, only with slippers on their feet, as the Wellingtons had all been abandoned in the mudroom through which they’d navigated. She noticed that both of the younger women had the nicotine-stained fingers of seasoned smokers and indeed she spotted a can of tobacco and a small rolling machine along the sideboard by the sink. She hoped they were not inclined to smoke with tea. For some reason she had never taken to it herself, though she had tried when she had first moved to London. It was terribly sophisticated, she knew, but she never liked how giddy it made her feel and besides, she got plenty of smoke from those around her in the pubs, and in the noisy plane rides over the water to France, since the men around her all smoked like factories.
The biscuits were very well received, leapt on by the ladies with alacrity. The cocker spaniels benefited as well, as each of the women broke off bits of cookie to drop surreptitiously on to the nose of the nearest dog.
“How are you finding everything, my dear?” asked Gwen, squinting at Lane. She had glasses on a string around her neck.
“Everyone has been lovely,” Lane said. “It’s such a beautiful place and the Armstrongs’ old house is just the ticket for me.”
“Harris hasn’t been bothering you?” Mabel asked, with a short bark that might have been a laugh.
“I’ve met him at the post office. He does seem grumpy, but I can’t say he’s been bothering me. What sort of bothering might I expect?”
“Grumpy, do you call it? He’s got a savage temper and he still jumps at any loud noise. He never tried it on with Old Lady Armstrong because he went off to war with her youngest son, John, and came back without him. I don’t know what happened there, but I’ve always been suspicious because he gets so angry when anyone mentions John. He’s never been right since the war.”
“Yes, Mother, you’re going off track now, aren’t you? The question Miss Winslow asked was how might Harris be a bother.” Mabel turned away as she said this and her eyes closed momentarily in what looked like tired exasperation.
“If I know Harris, he’ll be watching whether your animals wander onto his side of the fence and whether you’ve done something to the water. You have the misfortune to be on the same creek. Unfortunately, we all get creek troubles from time to time; the screens get clogged and someone has to slosh in and clean them out. He’ll get shirty about having to clean it out himself now you’re here; he’ll want to blame you. It will be most satisfying for him. We, happily, are on the upper creek with the Armstrongs. If you get a dog he’ll phone you and demand you keep it from barking. He’ll object if you drive back from town too late at night because it wakes him up when people are changing gears coming up the hill here in their motorcars. Well, he comes by it honestly, I suppose.”
Mabel shook her head in a way that indicated that she concurred. “He certainly does. It’s the shell shock, I expect. He didn’t come back till ’20, and he was an absolute fright. And of course that silly woman from town he married had absconded. I’ve always thought . . .” At that she stopped herself, cleared her throat and had a great swallow of tea. “Would you like to get eggs from us, Miss Winslow? They’re lovely layers, our birds.”
As Lane was saying, “Please call me Lane and yes, I’d love to get on the egg rota,” Gwen said, with a dark expression, “You’ve always thought what, Mabel?”
Mabel shook her head and moved a frizzy wisp of greying hair away from her face. “Oh, it’s nothing. Rubbishy thoughts. Nonsense.” She got up and began to clear her cup to the low, battered white enamel sink that sat beneath the window.
“No, I want to know. You were always horrible about John, is this that stupid old story again? That John could even be interested in that pathetic, stupid woman is ridiculous. You never fail to bring it up.”
Mabel turned to her and said, “Gwen, darling, it has nothing to do with your John. If anything, she was setting her cap at everyone. I only mentioned once, years ago, that I thought she’d set her cap at him. She wouldn’t have had any luck, would she? John only had eyes for you and he was a lovely boy. I only meant that I think she did somehow succeed with someone while Harris was in France with John, because I thought she might have left because she’d gotten in trouble. There, I said it. And it’s slanderous, isn’t it, because for all I know she is dead. She’d be about fifty-five now, wouldn’t she? An old lady. None of it matters now, does it?”
“Do you mean Harris’s wife?” Lane asked. Gwen looked guiltily away, but said nothing.
Old Mrs. Hughes stood up and pushed back her chair noisily. “Stop this bloody awful row, would you? What’s done is done. I, for one, am going to lie down. Harris is coming later in the afternoon with his noisy, smelly tractor to move the trees he cut out of the orchard last week. There, Miss Winslow, you must be shocked to hear us maligning a man upon whom, I’m afraid, we are rather dependent. He may be bitter but he is not lazy. I doubt, for example, that that idle specimen, Reginald Mather, would come to our aid if we were on fire. He’s been here nearly as long as I have and I’ve never seen him do a hand’s turn. Very lucky in his fa
mily, that one.”
CHAPTER FIVE
JUNE EASED FORWARD WITH A surprising morning of light rain, and then settled back to what it had been: dry, hot, and uncompromising. A frittering wind had picked up, but even at this early point in the day, it seemed only to be moving masses of sluggish hot air from one place to another. Lane had tried to set a routine, but she was struggling to follow it. She was meant to be up with the sun, tea on the porch, and then breakfast and a good two hours of writing. As she had on the previous days, she sat now at the business end of this plan, facing a reproachful typewriter with a blank sheet of paper hanging out of it. She knew what the trouble was: she had no idea what she wanted to write. And she’d had no idea how difficult it was going to be. She had begun to write her poetry when she was young, before the war. She felt vaguely embarrassed now about these early efforts, but had not imagined it would be so very difficult to write something else. Poetry, after what she’d been through, seemed all she could manage. Stories? A novel? When she allowed her mind its freedom, it wandered compulsively back to the war, a subject she daren’t tackle. For one thing, she wanted to leave the whole tiresome thing behind, and for another, she’d sworn an oath of secrecy and she did not trust herself to write about any of it, in case she wandered out of bounds.
She rested her fingers on the keys and thought, I’ll just start with any old line and see what comes up. Resisting the temptation to write “The quick brown fox,” she paused and then wrote: