‘ “The first doe he shot at he missed...” ’
She squirted washing up liquid into the yellow bowl.
‘“The second doe he trimmed he kissed...’
She slid an apple pie into the oven.
‘ “The third doe went where nobody wist Among the leaves so green-o!” ’
She washed out Toby’s shirt, a paisley in screaming hyacinth blues.
‘ “Oh, the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree They flourish and grow in my own country.” ’
She ironed Toby’s shell-pink shadow patterned shirt and tie.
‘ “Oh, he that I wed must be north-country bred
And carry me back to my north-country home ...” ’ She mended a rent in Rory’s jacket.
Once she looked up and found him staring at her. ‘Am I disturbing you?’ she jerked nervously. Jennie’s apologetic manners had a way of growing on one.
‘Why jump to the wrong conclusion?’ he countered. ‘I was enjoying it. You sing a lot better than you used to.’
A two-edged compliment. ‘Mrs. Brown,’ Haidee said not too lucidly. ‘The piano. She sang too, actually.’
‘An accomplished woman.’
‘Yes.’ For a moment her mother’s presence seemed strangely near. In life a humorous one, now, somehow, it did not seem to blame.
On another occasion Haidee went to move Brand from the arm of the master’s chair. ‘Can’t you leave him alone? He’s doing no harm,’ Rory said shortly, and Toby dropped her a ferocious wink.
Each Sunday morning she went to church with Jennie and Toby. In the churchyard people shook her hand and inquired after Antonia and no one seemed to doubt but that she was Suzanne. It was evident, however, that no one had been intimate with the stormy daughter of the big house. The poignant fact was that when Suzanne wanted a confidante she had gone across the fields to the convent.
No one had mentioned Mother Mary again. Haidee hoped she might yet escape meeting her.
Most settling of all was the feeling that Rory had put Suzanne away again in the place where he had kept her over the years. He seemed to accept that the clock could not be put back and the Suzanne who had returned was not the wife he had lost. He made no further approaches.
It was a toss-up how long the fine spell would last. The twenty-eighth of October, feast day of St. Simon and St. Jude, was often wet. This year it came and went and October continued to dance in blue petticoats and golden shoes. Rory who wanted rain said there would be no change till the new moon.
Toby had other wants. A school friend’s fox terrier had had pups, all but one of which had been spoken for. Successfully, that is. Toby had already spoken—at least twenty times—and Toby was a child who never took no.
‘I think I’ll call’ him Punch,’ he confided to Haidee. ‘It ought to be something that goes with Toby, don’t you think? He’ll go with me everywhere.’ He threw her a puckish glance. ‘That’s a joke, in case you don’t know.’
‘And in case you don’t know, your father doesn’t exactly go a bundle on the idea.’ Rory’s reaction to the last approach had been more pungent than usual, a hangover from the previous day when Toby had forgotten his latchkey and had broken a window in the house to gain admittance.
‘Oh well, keep trying,’ Toby remarked philosophically.
‘But you don’t, do you? Not properly,’ Haidee challenged. ‘You could do heaps better. I wish you’d give it a whirl. For me, if that’s not too silly. Before I go.’
‘Go?’ Toby had a mobile face and now its mouth fell open. ‘Go where, Johnny? I thought you’d come home. Oh, heck, I don’t want you to go. It’s nice you and Buggy being here.’
‘And nice of you to say so.’ Since coming to Glenglass, she had questioned more frequently than was wise how Suzanne could have borne to leave this child. Granted, he was forgetful, dilatory and saucy—only two days ago his school-teacher, introduced by Jennie after church, had commented ruefully that, like someone of more fame, he never listened when not amused—but he was so much else besides, cheerful, warm-hearted, friendly. The cry each afternoon: “Hi, Johnny! I’m back!’ had now become something for which she looked.
Manifestly, however, emotion had to be cloaked and she did so, reproving him for the use of ‘Buggy’ and saying quite firmly that she had only come to be with Jennie while their mother was ill.
It did not deflate the hearer. ‘She’s going to die, isn’t she? I hope she doesn’t do it too quickly.’
The hope seemed likely to fruit, for the fortnight had brought no change in Antonia’s condition. She remained deeply comatose.
‘There’s no telling how long this could last,’ the doctor said each time Haidee and Jennie went to the hospital, and it could have been no more than wishful thinking on Haidee’s part that the small-boned wide-browed face on the stiff pillow held a greater measure of tranquillity than it had done before. All in all Antonia, for the moment, and probably for all time, was out of their hands.
Jennie remained solicitous as ever. Her brown eyes were as selfless as a spaniel’s and she refused gently but firmly all suggestions that she should return to school. ‘Oh, Rory, I’m sorry. I know you want me out of the way, but I’m not a child any longer and I’ve got to be here. If you put me on a plane or anything, I’ll take the next one back and stay in a hotel. Sorry, but I will. Honestly.’
Rory, whose days were seldom short, had that day had a singularly long one. The dry weather had reduced leader growth and brought the twin hazards of late picnickers and stubble burning in the vicinity. He had instituted extra patrols and as well had a massive programme of fence repairs under way. When at last failing light had driven him towards the meal Haidee had been keeping hot, the wages book and a clip of accounts for payment had come with him. Toby, who had renewed the puppy theme, had been roughly curbed and Haidee would not have been surprised had Jennie met the same fate. She didn’t.
Rory’s natural expression was a serious one. Jennie seemed to make him smile more easily than most. ‘Point taken. And of course I don’t ‘want you out of the way’. You know that very well.
‘It can’t be much longer,’ he told Haidee sheepishly, when Jennie had left the room. ‘And there’s no sense expecting her to do school work till she can give her whole mind to it.’
‘Do you think she ever will?’ Haidee ventured, setting down his plate of soup. ‘She wants to work in a forest. Are there any jobs for girls?’
‘Not for Jennie,’ Rory asserted, blowing on his spoon. ‘She’s set for higher things. It would never surprise me if she got to Cambridge.’
Haidee’s third Saturday in Glenglass brought trouble. It began as a conversation.
‘Toby, you mustn’t do that here. It’s dangerous,’ Jennie’s voice averred.
‘It’s not, I checked it. It’s out,’ Toby returned.
‘We’d better go and make sure.’
Haidee watched the two figures walking towards the wood. Jennie, in her leather jacket and looking anxious, was hurrying ahead, Toby in mustard-coloured jeans was sauntering behind, his shoulders wagging naughtily in a parody of her. A bad lad, Haidee owned, but an endearing one.
When they came back, however, Rory was with them and Toby was no longer laughing.
‘The number of times I’ve told you,’ the forester was saying. ‘One spark, that’s all it needs. One match—a million trees. God knows how much we’ve spent putting this across to the public and here I find you...’
‘I put it out,’ Toby squeaked. ‘I didn’t know it would start again...’
‘Didn’t burn?’ Rory echoed cuttingly. ‘Didn’t look. Didn’t care. And never will so far as I can see!’ He strode furiously away.
Again Haidee heard Jennie’s slightly heavy tones. ‘It’s all right, Toby, he doesn’t mean it. He got a start, that’s all.’
As anyone would have done, Haidee thought, coming on a still smouldering camp fire and learning that one’s own son had lit it and left it unextinguished.
>
‘He was going back, you know,’ she ventured that evening when she and Rory were alone. ‘It would have been put out whether you’d been there or not.’
‘Thanks to Jennie,’ he answered sourly. ‘Don’t try to kid me, Suzanne, or to protect your son. I know what I’m up against.’
‘He’s your son too, remember.’ She was stung into the retort and suddenly sorry for it. There was something so flat and empty about Rory’s face.
‘Yes,’ he said heavily.
‘So don’t give up hope for him. He must have it in him somewhere. Good housekeeping, I mean, and responsibility. That’s all he needs. He has the love already.’
‘Love?’
‘For Glenglass. The animals, actually. He’s taught me such a lot.’
‘Taught you?’ It was such a searching gleam that for a second her blood chilled. ‘You’re his mother, for heaven’s sake. You lived here seventeen years. You should be teaching him.’
A bad moment, but practice was halfway to making her perfect. Deftly, she bailed out. ‘The point is not how much I’ve forgotten, it’s how much Toby knows. You should give him more credit, Rory, and encourage him more. I sometimes think you think you’re breaking a horse.’
But to a still crestfallen Toby having cocoa in bed after his bath, it had to be a different story. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he complained.
‘Yes, it was,’ Haidee told him forthrightly. ‘You didn’t look properly. I know. I do it too. So what about making this a “Keep Your Eyes Open” week? Both of us. We’ll remind each other.’
He had looked so unimpressed that she was astonished to hear next morning at breakfast. ‘I don’t think I’d better go to church. Johnny and I are having a “Keep Your Eyes Open” week and I want to check on a few things at Cats Spinney.’
‘Such as?’ Rory’s masklike face should have warned him.
It didn’t. ‘Deer might be getting in,’ Toby offered.
‘Hm.’ The face was still solemn. A forefinger crooked and beckoned. Haidee watched as Toby sidled towards him. ‘Look up there,’ Rory commanded. ‘What do you see?’
‘The sky.’
‘And how does it look this morning? Pretty secure?’
‘Yes,’ Toby said doubtfully. He turned round, his quizzing eyes making him more like his father than she’d yet seen him. It was enhanced by his Sunday suit having a safari jacket the miniature of Rory’s.
‘Good,’ he was told drily. ‘Then I don’t think we need worry about deer in Cats Spinney. Good grief, Toby,’ the forester added irritably, ‘catch yourself on! If you’d had something sensible in mind I might have said yes.’
By lunch, however, he mellowed. ‘Anyone who’s interested in keeping their eyes open had better come with me this afternoon.’
It was astonishing that November should hover like this, its touch so delicate that hardly one shrivelled leaf curl had been disturbed. They packed into the car with a festive air, Haidee, as commanded by Toby, in the back with him, Jennie, with a flush of pleasure in the front with Rory.
‘If you’re sure. I don’t like taking the best seat.’ In amber blouse and belted long-length skirt she was looking too mature for anyone to resurrect the question of school.
Clothes were nice just now. There was almost a touch of the State Trumpeter about Haidee’s flared sleeveless tunic and matching hunting pink trousers and her long pointed printed shirt. Nor had she the monopoly of colour. Rory’s near-to-the-ears sweater was peacock green and Toby’s had a breastplate of gold and yellow diamonds. Jennie, however, with her puffed sleeves and long buttoned cuffs, was the one who spelled elegance. She sat very easily, her elbow resting on the back of the seat, her chubby profile alight at what Rory was doing.
Rory was singing. Unexpectedly. Haidee had not heard him sing since the day he had brought her to Glenglass and discomfited her so much by lilting ‘Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye.’ It was not ‘Johnny’ now but a song about St. Patrick and less than reverent.
‘St. Patrick was a gentleman,
Who came of decent people:
He built a church in Dublin town
And on it put a steeple.
His father was a Gallagher,
His mother was a Brady.
His aunt was an O’Shaughnessy,
His uncle an O’Grady.’
In the village the car stopped. ‘See if Tom’s there,’ Rory said, indicating a house. ‘Ask him if he’d like to come too.
‘I have a conscience about Tom,’ he explained as Jennie set forth with no palpable show of joy. ‘He comes from Cork and doesn’t get home every weekend. Besides which he’ll be company for Jennie.’
Again, however, there seemed no particular exuberance as Jennie returned with Tom, the young trainee, somewhat pink and bashful, at her side.
‘You three in the back,’ Rory ordered. ‘You come in here, Johnny. I thought we’d run down to Glendalough, but first I want to look at something.’
They turned and drove into forestry land again, stopping at last in a fenced-off tract whose stands of conifer and white-topped marking posts did not look greatly different from other plantations. The ground, however, was densely brown and springy to walk on and Rory explained that it was part of the peat bog on to which, at this point, Glenglass Forest ran. Not reclaimed, he added, in the sense of having been cultivated or dressed with mineral soil. After draining and trenching, these trees—Serbian spruce—had been planted on cut-over peat.
A bigger experiment had been carried out with species at Clonsast in the Midlands. There, in fifteen years they had stands of nineteen feet. Rory’s ‘bog’ had been going for only three years, but already his stands were up to Christmas trees and he had the highest hopes of them. He and Tom bandied terms like ‘cubic feet hoppus per acre’ which Haidee found unintelligible.
Intelligible, however, in any terms was pride and joy. There were, for instance, trenches of Norway and Sitka spruce which had only been planted last spring. Then as now the weather had been dry and many had lost too much water and died. Those that survived, however, were making progress. He kneeled on one knee beside the baby trees and touched them gently.
‘Do you talk to them?’ Haidee teased.
He flashed her a look like a match flare and then saw her twinkle and grinned.
‘I wasn’t laughing. At home I often talked to the roses.’ Too late she saw the danger and stopped.
‘Mrs. Brown?’ he queried.
She nodded.
‘A woman I’d like to have met.’
‘She’d have liked that too, actually.’
Her mother had been friends with everyone, a good neighbour even with her infirmity. And each year she’d greeted the first roses. For a second Haidee had to look away.
‘Well, let’s make tracks,’ Rory suggested as though he had noticed nothing.
‘The Wicklow Hills are very high
And so’s the Hill of Heath, sir?
The song about St. Patrick continued and, suitably, the smoky blue hills around them now had new grandeur. Statistics set County Wicklow’s seventy-two thousand acres of State Forest second only to County Cork’s eighty-three. The road from Laragh to Glendalough was proof enough.
Plantations were everywhere, crowning the furze-cushioned slopes, striding over the brows of mountains, zigzagging in giant’s writing above browned heather. Haidee had only one anxiety—the usual one. It was her first visit, whereas Suzanne, brought up within six miles of Glendalough, must often have gone there.
It helped that Rory wanted to inform Toby on its history. ‘You two wander off if you like,’ he told Tom and Jennie. ‘This pair,’ indicating Haidee and Toby, ‘have a “Keep Your Eyes Open” week to live up to.’
Tom was losing his shyness. ‘Come again,’ he invited, and when the situation was explained he plucked masterfully at Jennie’s sleeve. ‘Not for me, thanks. Come on, Jen.’
‘Oh!’ Jennie began, startled. Her cheeks had gone quite pink and her nose had that sudden chi
ldish shine. ‘I can’t walk very far in these shoes, I’m afraid.’
‘Okay, we won’t walk, we’ll have tea,’ her escort conceded without loosing his hold.
At the same moment Rory’s arm descended, quite as masterfully, on Haidee’s shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said sotto voce. ‘This is no place for an old married couple.’
It came out so naturally that she was dumbfounded. ‘Please be careful.’
‘Careful? Of what?’ The dark eyes looked cool and amused. ‘The truth? You are my lawful wedded wife. I have the certificate in my desk to prove it. And it’s high time we had another talk.’
‘Talk? What about?’
‘Us,’ he drawled. ‘I’m acquiring quite a taste for your cooking.’
‘Oh no!’ It came out before she could help it. Tragically. The eyes went cold. The face was instantly gaunt.
‘I see.’
Such a misnomer, she thought helplessly. He saw nothing, he understood nothing. And at that moment neither did she. She’d felt so happy, hearing him sing, watching him with the seedling trees, looking sideways in the car to his broad-topped arm and his chin jutting over the vivid sweater roll. Rose-coloured spectacles, perhaps, but every detail of the approach from Laragh had seemed so melodic ... beehives on a slope, the Round Tower pointing through the trees, the brick and cream hotel, the donkey and cart on the sign outside the tweed shop.
Now the scene had clouded. Alice was falling out of Wonderland. Worse, she was turning into pain, a welling pain not unlike the slow dark lap of the lake. ‘I mean—not here,’ she stammered.
It was a hand that somehow she had to put out, whether to seek aid or to give it she was quite unsure. Strangely, it seemed to have served both purposes.
‘No, well, I didn’t mean here either,’ Rory agreed, the tautness leaving his face. ‘Come on.’
As guide, he was a natural. He put together the pieces that a thousand years had scattered and made them live. St. Kevin’s monks chanted again in the ruined chapel, students memorized their lessons in the remnants of their round huts, the gate-house opened its arched entrance door, the look-out in the Round Tower alerted the settlement to the danger of a Viking raid. As for stories, he knew them all. No birds sang now in the valley of the two lakes; they had ceased when Kevin died. A shelf of rock in the cliff overhanging the Upper Lake was Kevin’s Bed. Retreating there one day, the saint had been followed by one Kathleen, and had thrown her ungallantly into the lake. A gentler tale was that of the doe commanded to give her milk to a motherless child. The marks of Kevin’s fingers as he’d sat milking her were embedded for all time in the stone. Rory’s hand guided Haidee’s into them.
Dear Deceiver Page 11