‘This is far enough. I know the man who owns the place. He never uses it – it isn’t much good for farming, this kind of land. Bit of sheep grazing in these next two fields, but really only for summer. I’ve often thought I’d like to buy this bit so that the boys and I could fix up the byre as a kind of beach hut – leaving camping and cooking stuff in it. Maybe come over some evenings in the summer. But somehow there’s always something else to spend the money on.’ He looked at the place more speculatively. ‘Really ought to sound Marshall out, though. The land’s not worth much. And he can’t get building permission here. I have to,’ he added, ‘keep reminding myself that it’s necessary to find time to spend with the boys. Time alone. I can’t let them grow up completely with the Tolsons. I shouldn’t let myself just become part of the background. I ought to mean something different to them.’
He led us through the dunes at a place where a beck trickled down to the sea. ‘It becomes a torrent after heavy rain,’ he said. Then we walked about a mile until we rounded the rock pools at the foot of a low sandstone headland. A small beach glistened between that and another headland. ‘St Bees is a bit farther on.’ The Irish Sea glinted greyly in brief flickers of sunlight, with the beginning of a swell on it. ‘Always in a contrary mood, the Irish Sea is,’ Nat remarked. ‘It doesn’t have anywhere to go except to pound England on one side and Ireland on the other – a hell of a lot of compression in one small space.’ We ate hunks of bread with pieces of cheese and ham, and tried to smear on butter with plastic knives, and squeeze on mustard from a tube. I got both butter and mustard on the new anorak, and Nat said it looked better. We sat with our backs against a boulder and drank very good red wine, passing the bottle back and forth to each other because the paper cups spoiled the taste. Afterwards we walked along the beach and Nat showed me how to make my way up a small cliff face, using the new boots, how to look for footholds and handholds. ‘Definitely not to be tried on your own, you understand. A fall of ten feet is enough to kill you if it’s in the wrong place.’
As we climbed, Nat gathered the little flowers and plants that grew in the crannies of the rocks, giving them their names – thrift, scurvy grass, rock samphire, bloody cranesbill – marvellous names I thought, and tried to remember them. I tried to memorise too the birds he named – the terns, the fulmars, guillemots, kittiwakes – but all that was really familiar were the gulls, and their haunting piercing cry. Then suddenly Nat said, ‘We’ll have to move, or we’ll be stranded here. The tide’s coming in.’ We went back down the rock face with careful ease, but there was a sense of haste in the way we packed together the remains of the picnic. Nat cleared the sand where we had sat of the last matchstick, and the first drops of rain began to fall. By the time we reached the ruined byre where the Bentley stood, it was a downpour.
‘No use waiting,’ Nat said, surveying the leaking roof. ‘We’ll get just as wet here as in the car.’ He showed me how to adjust the hood of the anorak so that it covered almost everything but my eyes, and then he took an old cloth cap and loose oilskin from under the seat of the Bentley.
As he climbed in he said, ‘This is one of the times when I know what a damn fool I am to be bothering with a kid’s toy like this. I spend more time and money on it than I can afford, and the Land Rover is a damn sight more efficient and more comfortable. I never bothered with it when Patsy was here, but afterwards Tolson sort of thrust it on me as if I needed something to play with. I’m supposed to be a pretty good mechanic. It was a bit of an embarrassment when Askew showed up and I realised I was driving his car ... Well, keep your head tucked down. The wipers don’t work, so we’ll have to lower the whole windscreen. It’s going to be a long, wet, cold drive.’
It was all of that. And it was worse because Nat’s mood seemed to have changed as quickly as the rain had come down. He didn’t attempt to talk during the drive; I thought sometimes he cursed the labouring slowness of the Bentley on the grades, and the car seemed to him as he had described it – a silly child’s toy. The tops of the fells had vanished in the mist. Kesmere emerged at last out of a sullen grey landscape. Nat was perfunctory as he said goodbye in the town’s car park, stopped beside my Mini. The rain poured down, and the place was deserted. His mood seemed to have taken on the wintry quality of the day. He was regretting the picnic, I thought; all the way through that wet drive he must have been thinking how much better the time might have been spent. I tossed the bundle with the boots and socks into the back of the Mini, and prepared to get in. I didn’t know if I should try to thank him; a starkness in his face froze the words. He had probably taken me to a place where he and Patsy had often picnicked, and with me it hadn’t been worth the journey. As I got into the Mini he suddenly said, ‘Here – take these,’ and he turned away without another word. In my hand were the little rock plants he had gathered, and the feathers of dune grasses. I didn’t know whether he gave them to me as a gift, or because he simply didn’t want them himself. That night in the Spanish Woman’s room I laid them carefully between sheets of a newspaper and put them away in my big suitcase. Then I shook the sand out of the pockets of the anorak.
In the next few days I eased myself into the stiffness of the new walking boots. In spite of the heavy layers of socks they raised blisters in a few miles’ hike. ‘Tenderfoot,’ I told myself, as I soaked in a mustard bath that Jeffries had insisted on my taking. Jeffries knew all about such things as mustard baths, and when to drink brandy after a long walk. I began to wonder how Nat Birkett would have taken to him. Probably not at all, I thought, as I soaked myself, and then went back to the brandy poured and waiting in the Spanish Woman’s room. Jeffries loved the Spanish Woman’s room, as, by this time, he loved every part of Thirlbeck, even those parts whose untidiness and neglect troubled him. He deplored the rack of conveniences, the old-fashioned stoking of the heating and hot-water system, he worried about the state of the roof. ‘But it’s a marvellous house, isn’t it, Miss Roswell? And those pieces downstairs – they’d make you want to weep to see them all bundled together like that. But still, I suppose Mr Tolson’s right. He has to look after them in the only way he can. Actually, his security is quite good, considering it’s a sort of home-made job. Would cost a fortune, though, to put this house properly to rights ... pity.’ He didn’t, however, like the dogs, and he was puzzled, as I was, even if I refused to admit it, that they had begun to hover around me whenever Askew was away from the house. ‘Ugly-looking great brutes, aren’t they, Miss Roswell? When I saw you setting off for a walk yesterday and all eight of them trailing you I really wondered if you’d be safe.’
‘I think I couldn’t be safer.’
He had looked doubtful, but then brightened as another thought came. ‘Well, Mr Stanton’s in his own room at last at the hospital, and he’ll be out in less than a week if all goes well. Remarkable recovery. He’ll live to be ninety.’ I had the feeling that if Gerald did do that, Jeffries would feel obliged to live long enough to take care of him.
‘Wonderful people, the Tolsons. There aren’t many like them now. Perhaps there’s something to be said for living in the country and keeping your roots. That little Jessica girl – very clever, she is. And very capable. Can turn her hand to almost anything. It’ll be a lucky man who marries her. But I haven’t noticed any boyfriends around. Well ... there’s plenty of time. She wouldn’t throw herself away on just anyone, that little girl.’
The edges of life at Thirlbeck that had been a little ragged became smoother with Jeffries’s presence. In his total devotion to Gerald he wanted to serve Gerald’s friends. He seemed to take no time off for himself. If he was not with Gerald at the hospital, he took on any task that was offered at Thirlbeck. ‘I like to be busy,’ he said when Askew demurred about him doing too much. And then he added quietly: ‘One likes to be needed, my lord.’ And so he waited on table, and pressed clothes, cleaned bathrooms, vied with Jessica in producing beautiful food; he shared meals and exchanged recipes with the Tolson wives, and baked
and iced a triumphant birthday cake for a Tolson grandchild.
The Condesa in those days displayed a dimension I had not expected in her – why did one think that beautiful women like her would always be self-centred and helpless? She had an ability to amuse and charm Gerald, and she used it unsparingly. She had a knack for finding books and magazines which would interest or amuse him, without tiring him. She would even read aloud to him from some of the magazines, making sharply wry comments on English customs and manners which delighted Gerald. Every day she brought fresh flowers, which she insisted on arranging herself, and she was very skilful with them. The flowers that arrived from friends in London were handed over to her, and she brought vases from Thirlbeck to replace the utilitarian ones belonging to the hospital, which she knew Gerald loathed. And when she sensed Gerald was tiring, she would sit quietly in the room, saying nothing, working at her needlework frame, and I was not the only one who knew that just the sight of her pleased and soothed him. Jeffries openly adored her. ‘A really elegant lady,’ was his comment. ‘What a pity she can’t marry Lord Askew.’
I found my own rather solitary place in the world of Thirlbeck in those days. There was the daily visit to Gerald, and a report to Hardy’s. Between them, Jeffries and the Condesa seemed to have taken away many of the small tasks I might have done for Gerald, so I was free to walk, and to drive, wherever I pleased. For the first few days I drove far afield of Thirlbeck, becoming familiar with the range of this country that seemed almost a foreign place. At first I did the obvious things – Wordsworth’s tiny cottage at Grasmere, the churches of the dales, the haunting ruins, stark against the sky, of ancient castles, the druidic circles of stones that had stood, their purpose unrecorded, from pre-history. Beyond Thirlbeck’s closed valley there were the great sweeps of fells and dales, the long stretches of the larger lakes, the eerie flatness of Morecambe Bay when the tide was fully run out. I never went back to the stretch of sandstone cliff near St Bees. Each day I turned back again to Thirlbeck with the sense of the history of this pocket of England more firmly impressed upon me. I had seen the worked-out coal mines and slate quarries, had seen Whitehaven from where Askew’s grandfather had plied his coastal vessels, and won a Dutch wife; I had seen the flocks of sheep, the Herdwicks, that were the wealth of this country, upon the dales and high on the fells. At Askew’s insistence, Tolson had given me keys to the two gates of the Thirlbeck valley, so I had the freedom to come and go, but more and more, as the days passed, I found myself turning back to Thirlbeck after the morning visit to Gerald, because the valley, and the house, seemed to hold the whole essence of this country. I walked the road over Brantwick, through the larch plantation, moving quietly to catch a glimpse of the herds of red deer that roamed its fringes. Once I had a glimpse of a stag, antlers briefly silhouetted. I stood by the ruin of the lodge where Vanessa and Jonathan had lived that summer and autumn when they had experimented with the new life that survival of the war had given back to them both, the experiment that had obviously failed. But it gave me nothing of them, just the renewed regret that I had known my father only after Vanessa was dead. I stood often in the copse of birch where the first evening the great white hound had appeared, but I never saw it again.
I found the stone marker that Askew had talked about. Half hidden by the tall reedy grass growing about it, it was set in the marshy area that ran down towards the lake, within sight of the crumbling balustrade that marked the line of what had once been Thirlbeck’s formal garden. I came on it by chance, and for a moment I didn’t realise what it was. It was a roughly hewn stone, about three feet high; it might once have been a lintel over a doorway, except that it tapered slightly, giving it the vague air of an obelisk. I brushed the grasses aside and deciphered the clumsily chiselled letters, almost obliterated by weather and the all-pervasive moss of this area. Juana. And then, beneath this, as if it were not identity enough, further words, slanting away crookedly. The Spanishe Woman. I squatted before it, tracing the lettering with my fingers, wondering if this had been made by the boy who had been with her when she died, the boy who had been at the court of Philip, and could read and write. Juana ... I wondered if Vanessa had ever seen this.
The ruined chapel and the burial ground of the Birketts was totally unexpected. It lay to the east of the house, on the side where the pele tower stretched to the sky. I found it by following a path that was barely more than a sheep trod to a copse of beech, elm, and oak, planted more closely than through the rest of the park. The walls of the roofless chapel had almost disappeared under a cover of ivy and briars, an outer wall kept the sheep out; the little iron gate sagged, but still held its place. It looked as if some work had recently been done on the hinges; Tolson, no doubt, had qualms about letting the sheep graze the graves of the Birkett family, but I thought myself it would have done the Birketts no harm, and at least would have checked the worst of the rough growth. Little sapling trees were beginning to gain height among the graves, a slender young birch had raised itself twelve feet within the walls of the chapel. I could read very few of the headstones because the blackberry straggled and sprawled voraciously over everything, clutching at my anorak and slacks. There were enough headstones, though, to account for many generations of Birketts. They couldn’t all have been here – some must have died in distant places. But there were enough, and from here, staring across the tip of the tarn that came closest to the house, I noticed that the place where I had seen the marker for the Spanish Woman seemed to form a roughly equilateral triangle with the chapel and the house itself. It might have been pure chance, its placing there, or quite deliberate. Who could say anything for certain now in the twisted story of the Spanish Woman?
In the brilliant sunshine of an early afternoon I followed a sheep trod that wound steeply upwards on the rough, heathery slopes of Great Birkeld and experienced the swift shock of seeing clouds quickly rolling down from the tops, the mist descending rapidly, the trail ahead and below blotted out, the tarn vanished, the sheep wall I had taken as my landmark gone. I knew at last the real danger of what Nat Birkett had warned me about, and I had not totally understood. I remembered, too, that I had told no one where I was going, what direction I was taking. They were used now to my wandering and no longer asked.
The mist changed everything. Now that I could no longer see the trail defined before me, every step was in question – had it gone up here, down there? Was this a fork, or some blind turning that might take me towards the sheer crags of rock, the dangerous slope of scree? I turned back, and the trail I had followed only minutes before was no longer there. Sounds came to me out of the mist – the sounds of sheep cropping at the sparse grass, a faint bleat, the rasping sound of my own breathing all thrown back and distorted by the white wall of vapour. I knew now that I had definitely lost the sheep trod – this was spongy moor grass, there were hollows and depressions filled with dark peat and little pools of water. I could have turned back on myself a dozen times in the next hour; I never found anything that looked like the trail again, and I was exhausted. I stepped beyond the shelter of a boulder, and my foot touched the edge of the scree flow; a few small rocks were dislodged and I listened to them rattle and bounce on their terrible journey to the bottom. I froze then, edged back a little, holding on to the boulder as if I hoped it would save my life. It would do nothing for me, only give me its hard rock surface to lean against. I sat down on the wet ground and prepared to wait – to wait until the mist might lift, or to wait until the cold of the coming spring night, the invading damp, brought the final exhaustion, the terrifying sleep of desperation. In the next hour I seemed to grow light-headed with cold, with hunger, and sleep, that deadly sleep, began to seem a pleasant alternative. I remembered the stories, the pitiful little news bulletins of walkers found dead from exposure within a few miles of warmth and shelter, and I always wondered how such things happened, and why they were so stupid. I wondered if I would die here above the valley of Thirlbeck – or might someone find me uncons
cious but still living? How cold did it become up here before dawn? And how long could one survive without moving? A kind of dreadful, fatal calm settled on me; I could begin to acknowledge that what I might be waiting for was not the mist to lift, or for the rescuers to come, but death itself.
I first heard it as a kind of far-off howl, unbelievably eerie and desolate. Was it near, or something coming from the floor of the valley, sound thrown back and reflected by the water, the high rock walls, the mist itself? It seemed to come from every direction; I was suddenly in the position of a sightless person trying to distinguish one sound from many. Then, very suddenly, it was quite close, the sounds of small rocks disturbed, the sound of feet on grass, and that awful howling sound. I screamed as something wetter than the mist touched my face, and then, at once, they were all around me. Sobbing, I put out my hand and touched the whiskery faces, their little beards with droplets of moisture strung on them like beads. ‘Oh, my God ... Thor ... Ulf ... Oden ...’ I found myself clinging about the neck of one of them – which one I didn’t know – and sobbing, wildly sobbing. Several of those rough tongues licked my face. One of them thrust his great head under my, arm, as if to urge me back on my feet. I got up slowly; one dog stayed beside me, the others went off into the mist – they might only have been feet away, but I could no longer see them. I didn’t know at that time if all eight were there. Their voices called to each other, and to me at intervals, as if indicating the direction I should move in. With my hand firmly on the collar of the dog who had stayed with me, I started down.
I don’t know how long that journey lasted. I was nudged and pushed and pulled – up a little here, down at another point. I never really knew if we got back on the sheep trod. They were smelling and sniffing their ways, hoarse barks of encouragement and guidance coming to me from the leaders out of sight. And then finally we reached one of the sheep walls that ran straight up the slopes of Great Birkeld – probably the one I had taken that afternoon as my landmark and guide. Step by step I went down, feeling my way, one hand on the rough piles of stone that were the wall, one hand on the dog.
The Property of a Gentleman: One House. Many secrets. Page 19