Rose Cottage

by Mary Stewart

  Mr Harbottle looked at his watch again, the flag was lifted, the engine blew another noisy cloud of steam, the couplings clanged and strained, and the train chugged off. Without another glance in my direction, Mr Harbottle put his watch away, picked up a spade which was leaning against a pile of sleepers, and went back to what he had presumably been doing before the train came in – digging his new potatoes up and sorting them lovingly into an empty fire bucket.

  So much for Kathy Welland’s homecoming. At my elbow the porter said, rather anxiously: ‘It’s all of two mile into the village, miss. No bus nor nothing. Didn’t they tell you when you booked?’

  ‘It’s all right. I haven’t much to carry. I don’t need the big case straight away. Can you keep it here till I can send for it? I can manage the other one easily.’ I had brought a light holdall with what I needed for the night.

  ‘Easy. It can stay in the office.’ He swung it up and I followed him along the platform, past the chocolate machine (it was empty; I wondered if it had ever been refilled after Prissy and I took the last piece out six years ago), and the penny-in-the-slot Try-Your-Weight machine, and the flourishing beds of geraniums and calceolarias and love-in-a-mist.

  ‘You staying in the village, miss? If it’s the Black Bull, they’re sending a cart along to meet the eight-sixteen in the morning. They’ve got beer coming then. I could put your bag on it if you like?’

  The Black Bull was the village’s single pub, four doors up from the vicarage, and next door to Barlow’s shop where Prissy and I had spent our halfpennies on liquorice bootlaces and gobstoppers. The pub’s loaded cart, I knew, would not want to turn aside down the steep lane that led from the high road to Rose Cottage.

  ‘No, not the Black Bull,’ I said, ‘but don’t you worry, I can get it picked up tomorrow. Thanks all the same.’ I gave him sixpence, which was twice the normal tip, but worth it for that smile again, as, with a cheerful ‘Ta, miss,’ he carried my case through the door marked ‘Station Master’ and flanked by tubs of geraniums and lobelias.

  As I went out into the sunny roadway I saw Mr Harbottle, still busy with his spade, getting on with his day’s work at the far end of the platform. No doubt he was preparing, as he had done every year since long before I was born, to scoop most of the Firsts at the local Agricultural Show in July. Meanwhile Todhall would come, as usual, high on the Commended list for the county’s best-kept station …

  Memory Lane. Well, I still had two long, hot miles of it to go, if I went by the road, but I knew all the bypaths and short cuts for miles around, and had come comfortably dressed for the walk. I followed the road for perhaps a quarter of a mile, till I reached a field gate giving on a track that showed the triple ruts of the farmer’s horse and cart. The track, shaded by an overgrown hedgerow, led along the side of a hayfield almost overdue for cutting, and deep in flowering grasses. A couple of hundred yards further, and I came to a gap in the hedgerow which had been roughly blocked by a criss-cross of hazel stems.

  It was no more than a token barrier, easy to step over. I stepped over, and picked my way carefully down a steep bank into what had once been a lane, but was now little more than a path between high banks overgrown with ferns and weeds, and overshadowed by the rampant hedges. It was a deep, secret place. Gipsy Lonnen, the gipsies’ lane.

  It had changed, with time. Years ago it had been an open, grass-grown lane where sometimes the travelling gipsies would pitch for a few nights, nights when we, the village children, were strictly forbidden to venture out after sunset. We had obeyed, frightened into obedience with tales of children stolen away by the gipsies, tales which somehow got mixed up in my childish mind with the legendary abductions of Kilmeny and the little changeling boy and other creatures of poetry and fairy tale.

  Even by day, when no gipsies camped there, the lonnen had been a scary place. At some time in the past a caravan had been abandoned there. A frightened horse, possibly, had backed it sharply into the bank, and a wheel had broken adrift, and the shafts with it. The wreck, abandoned, had rotted and fallen still further apart, but it retained the shape of the caravan, and to our childish minds it was a place where the wicked gipsy ghosts of fiction lurked, ready to pounce. The boys, when we girls were watching, would dare one another to run up the lonnen and touch the shafts or the steps of the van, but only the hardiest spirits ever did this. The rest of us, cowards all, thought ourselves brave enough if we climbed down through the gap with the hazel-boughs and then ran hard along the half-mile of stony grass to the stile and the field above Rose Cottage. The only time that Gipsy Lonnen lost its terror for us was in bramble-time, when adults and children together took their baskets and buckets into the lane to harvest the blackberries.

  Now I was an adult myself, and it was mid-afternoon, and there was no sign of gipsies. And the lonnen saved almost a mile. Somewhere out of sight to my right, presumably hidden now under the overgrowth of bramble and sapling, lay the remains of the gipsy van. I turned the other way. There was still a narrow path reasonably clear between high banks embroidered with wild roses and the white bramble flowers. Campion and ragged robin showed everywhere among the crowding ferns and Jack-by-the-hedge, and the air was filled with the fresh, lovely smell of wild garlic, late-flowering in the shade.

  The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory. I walked through the scented half-dusk full of garlic and fern and briar, trying not to think too much about what Gran had told me of the village gossip. Lilias and a gipsy? My young mother running off that night, with her Gladstone bag in her hand and tears on her face, to some vagrants’ camp in the lane? At least, I thought, I need not be haunted by the broken caravan; that could have had nothing to do with her. It had been there as long as I could remember. Or had it? I had been six when she went. Had our childhood games gone as far back as that? Or was that the haven she had run to that night? Whose had it been?

  I managed to thrust the thoughts out of mind, and walked on. Another half-mile along that nostalgically scented lane, then came the next gap in the bank, and the stile. I climbed over, back into sunshine and a freshly moving breeze, and the open, sloping field where, as children, we had come every Easter-time to roll our hard-boiled eggs in a sort of version of the conkers game played in autumn with horse chestnuts. At the foot of the Pace-Egg Field, as we had called it, was another stile. This, too, led into a lane, but an open sunny lane that sloped gently down towards a stream crossed by a wooden footbridge.

  And a few yards upstream from the bridge, snugly set in what had once been a lovingly tended garden, was Rose Cottage.

  I remember, I remember

  The house where I was born,

  The little window where the sun

  Came peeping in at morn …

  I believe that anyone returning to their childhood’s home is surprised to find how small it is. It was only seven years since I had lived there, but even so, Rose Cottage had shrunk. It was tiny, a genuine cottage, two-and-a-half up and two down, with a ‘back place’ built out behind, over which a diminutive bathroom had been added. The two-and-a-half up had dormer windows projecting from the thatch, and the little window of what had been my bedroom had not allowed the morning sun very much of a peep. The garden showed every evidence of the past years’ neglect, in a joyous riot of overgrown rose bushes and weeds and summer flowers, but someone – presumably one of the Pascoes – had cleared the front path, and the windows and curtains looked fresh and clean.

  I dumped my holdall in the porch, inserted Gran’s key into the lock, and pushed the front door open.

  It opened straight into the living room, the kitchen as we had always called it. This was a smallish room, some twelve feet square, with an open grate flanked by metal trivets, with the oven alongside. Inside the high fender the hearth had been freshly holystoned, and Gran’s old plate-warmer still stood there, a curious affair of turned wood, like a giant caltrop. All was just as I remembered it, the hearthrug made of hooked rags, warm and bright, with Granddad’s rocki
ng chair to one side, and a rather less comfortable chair opposite; the solidly made table, which, scrubbed daily till the grain of the wood stood up like ribbing, was used for everything, baking, ironing, eating from, but which between jobs was covered with a red chenille cloth bordered with bobbles. The sideboard, backed by an ornate mirror, was covered with a long runner edged with crocheted lace, on which stood a pair of vases, much admired by me as a child, with a design of richly sprawling roses and forget-me-nots. Between the vases stood a rather lovely old oil lamp, set aside as an ornament after ‘the electric’ came to the village in the twenties. Above the sideboard hung a framed text, THOU, GOD, SEEST ME, and a flight of china ducks soared on a slant up the wall.

  All this I took in at a glance, also that the place was as tidy, as newly dusted, as if it was still lived in. Mrs Pascoe, whose work, of course, this must be, had also been kind enough to leave a bottle of milk and a loaf on the table, with the bonus of a poke of tea and a note which said, ‘Welcome home and I’ve told the milk. Bottle in bed. Be down later. A. P.’

  No difficulty in interpreting this very real welcome home, but I made no immediate move to fill the kettle or unpack any of the stand-by provisions I had brought. I would have been less than human if my eyes had not gone straight to the wall at the left of the fireplace.

  Another text hung there, one that had been infinitely more inhibiting to a small, highly imaginative child. It said, in large capitals: CHRIST IS THE UNSEEN GUEST AT EVERY MEAL: THE SILENT LISTENER TO EVERY CONVERSATION. I remembered my own childish surprise that Aunt Betsy had dared to speak as she did sometimes with the Unseen Guest sitting right there and taking in every word.

  I lifted the text down.

  ‘You can’t see it,’ Gran had said. ‘It’s tiny, no more than a tin box built into the wall, and it’s papered over.’

  It wasn’t papered over. Someone had cut cleanly along the edges of the door, removing both plaster and paper, and there, stark against the small pink roses and faded grey trellis of the wallpaper, was Gran’s safe, just a small metal box cemented into the brickwork, with a keyhole showing, but no key.

  I must have stood there for some minutes, staring blankly, before it occurred to me to try to open the metal door. I did not waste time looking for the key, which, as Gran had told me after much thought, might be in any of the drawers or vases or other hiding places in the kitchen or anywhere else. I found a table knife and inserted it, with some difficulty, into the crack by the lock, and tried levering the door open. It would not budge.

  So, it was still locked. In some relief I stood back. Perhaps after all the safe hadn’t been broken into: it must be quite a few years since this paper had been pasted on, and it was possible that Gran herself had cut it back to put some later treasure into hiding, and then had forgotten about it, as she had forgotten the whereabouts of the key.

  The key. I peered into the vases on the sideboard. The first one appeared to hold nothing but two hairpins, a halfpenny, and a dead moth. The other was a quarter full of papers, and the assorted small rubbish of years. Well, later would have to do. No point in starting to worry tonight. I hung the text back in its place, and – the first really important action of every homecoming – went and put the kettle on.

  6

  I finished my tea, put away the iron ration of food that I had brought to last me till morning, then, spreading a sheet of newspaper on the table, I tipped out the contents of the second vase.

  A clutter of papers, a couple of clothes pegs, a toffee rather past its best, three safety pins and a thimble, and that was all. No key.

  The sideboard drawers next, with the same result. No key.

  I looked around me. The table drawer. The big cupboard in the alcove to the right of the fireplace. Two more vases on the mantelpiece, and a hundred other places where a tiny key might lie hidden. And then there were the back premises and the bedrooms.

  It would have to wait. I had, in any case, a strong suspicion that Gran had taken the key with her to Strathbeg, and forgotten all about it. It was just the sort of thing she would have tucked away in some pocket of the enormous holdall she called her handbag, that held everything from her purse and essential papers like ration book and identity card, along with her pills and her spectacles and her knitting and her prayer book, and other necessities of her life.

  I picked up my own holdall and opened the door in the wall opposite the fireplace, which gave on the steep, enclosed staircase. My steps rapped, echoing, on bare boards. At the top was a small landing where Gran’s beloved clock stood; a miniature long-case, the kind they called a grandmother clock. I remembered its gentle chime punctuating the long days of childhood. I would set it going, I thought, before I went to bed.

  My room had certainly shrunk. Two steps from the door to the foot of the iron bedstead that stood against one wall. Three from the bedside to the window sunk in the alcove under the slope of the ceiling. It was hard to believe that I had shared it with my mother. It had been her room until Aunt Betsy came to stay, after which I had moved in with her, while Gran, giving Aunt Betsy the larger of the two front rooms, had taken over my little room at the back.

  I dumped the bag and went to the window. I had to stoop to see out. There was a stool in the alcove, and I knelt on that and pushed the window open to look out.

  Beyond the weedy garden with its riot of rose bushes, nothing had changed. The beck, wide here and quiet, slid past below the bridge. Willows and wild roses, cuckoo pint and king cups, and a wood pigeon crooning in the elms.

  And someone crossing the bridge to approach the garden gate.

  It was someone I knew well, my godmother Mrs Pascoe, who had been my mother’s friend and had ‘helped out’ at the Hall when there were guests to stay. She was a little older than Lilias would have been, somewhere nearing her fifties, I guessed; a capable, comfortable woman who never seemed to be either fussed or short tempered – a valuable quality in the sometimes stressful world of a crowded kitchen.

  I went downstairs and opened the door to her.

  ‘Aunty Annie! How lovely to see you!’ We embraced warmly. ‘Do come in! And thank you for the welcome home. I had tea straight away, thanks to you, but the kettle won’t take long to boil up again if you’d like a cup—’

  ‘No, dearie, no. I’ll be going home soon. I just came over to see if you’d got here. I thought you might be on that train. Well’ – following me into the kitchen – ‘let’s have a look at you. You look well, Kathy. You’ve changed a bit, but then how many years is it? Six? Seven?’

  ‘Nearly seven, I’m afraid, but you haven’t changed at all! Not a day older! How’s Uncle Jim? And Davey?’ Davey was their son, who worked alongside his father. He was about my age, and had been in my class at the village school, and later at the Sec.

  ‘Oh, they’re all right. Nothing ever ails them. But what about your Gran? She didn’t sound so clever when she phoned me.’

  ‘I’m afraid she’s had a bad time, flu and then some gastric trouble. They took her into hospital for treatment and tests, but we hadn’t heard the result when I came south. Did she phone you from the hospital? Well, she’s home now, but she’s keeping her bed for a bit. Look, won’t you sit down?’

  ‘Well, thanks, but just for a minute. I only came along to see if you had all you need.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. I brought enough for tonight, and I’ll go up to the village tomorrow. Thank you for the milk and the tea – Gran did tell me that you were coming in to fix the place up, but it was just wonderful to get here and find everything so lovely. You wouldn’t know we’d ever been away! I hope it wasn’t too dirty.’

  ‘It wasn’t so bad. I’ve been coming down about once a month to open up and stop the place getting damp, so there wasn’t all that to do, bar a few spiders to chase out, and a fall of plaster over by the fireplace there. But nothing to worry about, and you can see there’s no damage to the ceiling.’

  I looked where she pointed, but it wasn’t the c
eiling I was thinking about. I was remembering the plasterless state of the square of wall behind the Unseen Guest. Presumably she hadn’t lifted the picture down to see that. And possibly – a less comfortable thought – the plaster had been chipped away during the last three or four weeks, since she had last been in to air the cottage …

  ‘How long d’you reckon you’ll want to stay?’ she was asking.

  ‘What? Sorry. Oh, not long, just enough to get Gran’s things sorted and the ones she wants packed up. I suppose you knew that she’d decided to stay up at Strathbeg? I doubt if she’ll ever come back here.’

  ‘She didn’t say much, but I thought that would be how it was. I suppose she feels at home there. Oh, well. Look, dearie, can I change my mind? I’ll take a cup, if you’ll have another with me yourself?’

  Over the fresh brew of tea I told her about Gran’s new house in Strathbeg, and the furniture that was to be sent north. She already knew something about it from Gran herself, and had talked it over with her husband. Mr Pascoe knew a good firm of carriers in Sunderland who would do the moving, she said, and she and Davey, when he could, would help me with the packing.

  ‘They’re working at the Hall now, aren’t they? Lady Brandon told me the family were keeping some rooms for themselves.’

  ‘That’s so. It’ll be a nice place for them when it’s done, and it’ll be good to see them back here again. Todhall isn’t the same without the family. The word goes that Sir James isn’t likely to come back much, but my lady always loved this place, and I dare say Miss Margery’ll be here with the children.’

  ‘Have you heard anything about the plans for Rose Cottage?’

  But she had not. A firm of contractors from Darlington were being called in to do the main work of the hotel conversion, but the Brandons had made it a condition that local tradesmen should be employed there, too, whenever possible.