The Travellers

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘Last year I thought I’d switch to science because the job prospects were better. And I thought I could do something useful in the world. I loved the arts subjects, but I thought it was a bit immoral, just sitting around reading books and enjoying yourself.’

  Kate smiled. ‘Better to take subjects you enjoy, and do well in them, than to suffer, studying something you hate. Anyway, I was reading an article in the paper on Sunday that said graduates with arts degrees were just as likely, and possibly more likely, to find employment. They’re seen by employers as more flexible, while scientists are perceived to be specialists. That may all be nonsense, of course, but it’s worth taking into consideration.’

  ‘I’d quite like to do French,’ he said hesitantly, ‘but I couldn’t possibly catch up, could I? In just one year?’

  ‘I could help. You’d probably only need to take two subjects, wouldn’t you? If you could get good marks in two, then with the C in maths...’

  ‘Maybe I could do French and English. I’ve read most of the English set books that were on the syllabus for this year.’

  ‘Let’s go and see Mr Ramage,’ said Kate, giving his shoulder a squeeze. ‘And see what he thinks.’

  Lying awake that night, as she did so often these days, Kate felt as though she was convalescing from some severe illness. She was drained. At least Stephen had been safely steered in the right direction. She had been afraid he would not listen to her, and she thought of István with his son at much the same age. Like her, he had not been able to share the problem with another parent. Thinking of his tragedy, with his young wife killed when László was just a baby, she felt that Tom’s problems shrank into insignificance.

  He was lying beside her now, breathing deeply, but holding himself apart even in sleep. The new mood of withdrawal was some relief to her, after his violence, but his hostility and furtiveness were chilling. Whatever it was that he was up to, it had shaken him out of that nearly catatonic state which had so frightened both Beccy and herself. She had told him about the appointment with the benefits office, but did not know if he had kept it. At the moment she did not care what had galvanised him – it might even be a woman, for all she knew. Examining the thought as she watched the rectangle of the window grow pale with the rising moon, she found she felt nothing.

  She turned on her side and closed her eyes so that she could see again the wide cool room, reaching the full width of István’s flat in Sopron, with its shuttered window overlooking the garden. It would be an hour later there, even nearer the middle of the night. Was István asleep, or was he working? Certainly he would be back in Sopron by now, away from Szentmargit with all its powerful memories.

  Thinking of him, she fell asleep.

  * * *

  Carefully István turned his wrist so that he could see his watch: 3 a.m. Old Lanja’s breathing had been rasping for hours, but there was a difference now. Her frail hand, spotted with age, lay in his like a bundle of fragile twigs, apparently lifeless. The change in her breathing would mark the change in her condition. They had not called him soon enough, her good-for-nothing son and his wife, and the antibiotics might have come too late to relieve the congestion in her lungs.

  Lanja took a few shallow breaths. Too shallow, like some small, dying animal. Then she drew a deep shuddering breath.

  ‘Easy, my dear,’ said István, leaning over her. ‘Breathe slowly, now. Think of the scent of lilacs in the spring. Take a slow, deep breath. Can you smell them?’

  He did not know if she could hear him, but the breathing slowed, deepened, took on a regular rhythm. Her eyelids flickered briefly, and he caught a gleam from her eyes. He smiled at her, in case she could see him.

  ‘There now, well done.’

  She relaxed, and the breathing became the steady rhythm of sleep. István, exhausted after a long day, leaned his head back against the wall beside the bed, still holding the old woman’s hand, and closed his eyes.

  Kate, he thought. Oh, Kate.

  Chapter 14

  The walnuts on the old tree in the square had ripened. The village boys picked those they could reach by climbing, and knocked others down by throwing sticks up into the branches, but a few continued to cling on tenaciously at the very top of the tree. Most houses in the village now had a store of walnuts in a pot high on a shelf. Magdolna still used a crock her grandfather had made as a young man, soon after he came back to the village after the first world war and set up as village potter in succession to his father.

  István had come home to Szentmargit for a weekend and was sitting under the walnut tree with a group of other men on the Friday evening. Soon it would be too cold to sit out here, and the favourite places in the Blue Heron would be those near the big hearth with its glowing fire of logs gathered from the estate forest. István picked up a fallen walnut from the table and turned it in his fingers, thinking of the contorted pattern of the nut inside the hard shell. Like the complications of our inner lives, he thought, protected inside a carapace which presents a smooth, hard surface to the world.

  The others were discussing the latest plans for the manor house.

  ‘I think this idea to turn it into a school of agriculture is a good one,’ said Imre. The others accorded him respectful attention. Since the dramatic effect of Imre’s irrigation system on the harvest, he was regarded as one of the thinkers of the village.

  ‘See,’ he went on, ‘it will bring some employment – they’ll want staff to maintain a big place like that – the house and the garden and the greenhouses. And then the pupils and teachers will want to shop in the village. That will improve business all round. It could make it easier for us to get hold of new agricultural machinery and better seed corn. We might even get the road into the village repaired, for the first time in thirty years!’

  István listened to him without comment. He was inclined to agree with Imre. It would mean change, of course, and the village would seem less of a secret place, a peaceful retreat for him in times of stress. But he had the luxury of a solid profession and a steady income. He could not begrudge a little more financial security for the villagers.

  ‘Who’s to pay for it, though?’ József asked the world at large. ‘Seems to me the government doesn’t have the money.’ He jerked back from his beer glass as a walnut fell into it, splashing him. ‘Damn – will you look at that?’ He fished the nut out of his glass, licking the beer off his fingers.

  ‘You ought to take the house over, István,’ said Mihály. ‘As the son of the last count.’

  ‘It’s not mine to claim,’ said István calmly. They had been through all this before. ‘And I’d have no use for it. Can you imagine what it would cost to heat?’

  They all thought about this, with the winter snows not far away now. The older men remembered the powerful black cars ploughing through snowdrifts on the long driveway in wartime, with SS officers sitting inside in their fur-lined jackets. And the people of the village shivering and dying, huddled together over the few fires lit with illicit wood filched from the forest. István recalled the great stoves in the manor, with their network of secret corridors, and thought it unlikely anyone would ever attempt to use the house in wintertime again. Last week it had been closed to visitors until next Easter.

  ‘Come on,’ said Imre, picking up his half-empty beer glass. ‘It’s getting too cold out here. Let’s move inside.’

  * * *

  Stephen had gone back to school. It turned out that Mick’s results, though slightly better than Stephen’s, were not good enough for the university course he had set his heart on, so he had decided to retake the same subjects in the hope of getting better grades.

  And then Chris had said, on hearing Stephen’s depressing news, ‘I failed my A Levels first time round, you know. But it didn’t matter in the long run. Only held me back a year, and I think I got more out of university, being a year older and really knowing my subjects better.’

  Stephen probably paid more heed, Kate thought, to Mick and Chri
s than to anything she herself could say, but she didn’t mind. So long as he could see some goals ahead and feel he was moving forward. She went with him to see the headmaster and the head of the French department, who was pleased with Stephen’s fluency and gave him an armload of books to start reading. It was agreed that he would take just French and English at A Level this year, and combine these with his existing maths result for entry to university next year.

  Beccy and Roz went off together, two weeks after Stephen started back at school. Kate still felt that sixteen was too young to be starting alone at a college in London. She had wanted to take Roz to college, but conceded that she was needed more at home. Beccy would see Roz settled, spend the night with one of her old school friends in London, and then travel up to East Anglia the next day. She telephoned from her flat to say that all was well with Roz.

  ‘She’s in a super new hall of residence – only built last year. It makes this place look really grotty. We met two of the other freshers who seemed very friendly and nice, and she was happily going off with them to explore when I left. The Principal is keeping the Guarneri in the safe in the main teaching building, so Roz has to collect it and return it there whenever she wants to use it. He said he couldn’t be responsible for its safety if it went out of the building.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Kate, thinking of the years the violin had spent sealed in the cellar under the shop in Budapest.

  On Saturday, when Stephen came down for breakfast, she had the local paper spread out on the table. He had settled down apparently quite calmly at school, but she thought he still looked depressed.

  ‘I’ve had an idea,’ she said, pushing the boxes of cereal towards him.

  ‘Mmm?’ Stephen was not at his best in the morning.

  She tapped the paper on the section headed ‘Pets’.

  ‘As you are going to be at home for another year, I thought we’d get you a dog of your own.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked pleased. ‘You don’t think Toby would mind?’

  They both looked at Toby, who was sprawled in a patch of sunlight on the floor, chasing rabbits in his sleep.

  ‘Not at all. You know how gregarious he is. He’ll love having another dog to play with. Mark you, I expect you to train and clean up after this puppy yourself. Promise?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Stephen turned the paper round so he could see it, and began running his finger down the column. ‘I quite fancy a Labrador, don’t you? Like Sofia’s Ákos.’

  ‘I’m not sure he’s pure Labrador. He was a stray she took in – she thinks someone abandoned him on the beach when they found how large he was getting.’

  ‘It’s awful when people do that, isn’t it?’ He looked at her bleakly. ‘You shouldn’t abandon your dog any more than you should your child.’

  They spent a happy day together going round a short-list of kennels, but Kate knew Stephen had made up his mind at the second one they visited. They came back to it towards the end of the afternoon with Stephen sitting on the edge of his seat, saying, ‘Hurry, hurry. What if they’ve sold her already?’

  He had fallen for a golden Labrador bitch, all big feet and gangling frame. Kate was surprised. She thought he would want a dog.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘a bitch is better. Toby might feel ousted by a dog, especially as the Lab will end up bigger than he is.’

  The puppy took to Stephen at once, and when the purchase had been safely made she sat on his lap all the way back to Dunmouth, alternately looking curiously out of the window and licking his chin.

  Toby accepted the new puppy calmly, taking a proprietorial interest in her and inspecting her from head to tail. Stephen christened her Sarah, because, he said obscurely, she looked like a Sarah. Despite Toby’s affability, Kate decided to give him a long walk on his own on Monday, so he would know that he was still her particular companion. Because of the difficulties at home, they had not been for one of their walks beside the sea since Kate had come back from Hungary. Also, she thought she might call in at the bookshop to see Linda. Apart from telephone calls and one visit by Linda to Craigfast House, they had hardly spoken.

  Kate took Toby along the sandy beach from the castle, where she was less likely to be spotted from her parents’ house in Castle Terrace. After they had passed the last house in the row, she clambered up a breakwater, and over the tussocked dunes, both of which helped to keep the sea from nibbling the beach away. Then she crossed the road and began to search for the gap in the embankment which would allow them into the hidden valley where the old railway line had once run.

  It was Toby who found it, disappearing completely from sight through a dense thicket of broom. Kate pushed after him, and the dried seed pods on the broom bushes rattled about her ears and popped seeds down the back of her sweatshirt. It was much warmer in here than on the beach. The embankment provided shelter from the east wind coming off the sea – a small wind as yet, an autumn wind, not a winter one, but it had a cold edge to it. They found the traces of a path which led from one end to the other of the valley, with branches wandering off here and there, penetrating the undergrowth. Everything seemed larger and more vigorous than it had when she had last explored here in the spring. From the state of the path, she thought that few people had been here since then, though there were animal tracks to be seen. Toby found plenty of rabbits to chase. They had made a network of warrens in the embankment and in the rising ground on the opposite edge of the valley, where there were sandy slopes at the foot of the steep cliff leading up to the houses which stood out of sight beyond the top of the high ground, on the main Charlborough road.

  Walking on they found a small muddy stream, and there were more animal tracks here, which might have been a dog’s, but from Toby’s intense and quivering interest Kate guessed they belonged to a fox. Great rampant briar roses hung over the stream, studded with clusters of bright scarlet rose-hips the size of plums. A blue tit, perched between the vicious thorns on one of these branches, swayed up and down gently as it preened itself. It cocked its head at Toby, passing underneath, and fixed Kate with a beady eye, but did not take fright. She passed within two feet of it.

  Kate found a hump of rock sticking up through the damp, overgrown grass and the spikes of dying willow-herb, and sat on it while Toby ranged around her, following interesting smells into the bushes. Drifts of willow-herb seed-heads, soft as silk, floated past her as he disturbed them. All this tumultuous growth and wild profusion reminded her in some indefinable way of the secret waterways through the marshes at Szentmargit, where the boat had slipped under the waving heads of the reeds. Reminded her, too, of the ragged hedge at the side of the field of sunflowers, where the thunderstorm had caught them.

  Every other inch of ground in Dunmouth, she thought, even Sofia’s garden, is planned and disciplined. Only here do things grow unchained, according to their own natures. In less than thirty years, since the railway line was dismantled, this place has changed from the bare cindery area of a man-made track to something belonging entirely to nature, and not to man at all. The flowers and bushes and trees had to compete with each other, but they have found a modus vivendi. Over those years a balance has been struck, so no one species has dominated and driven out the others. Standing up at last, she reached over to a hazel tree and picked a handful of nuts. They were ripe and sweet, and she munched them as she followed a different path back to the gap behind the thicket of broom.

  Her first weeks back in Dunmouth had plunged her into frantic activity, but now she had a sense of being sucked back into that dark isolation which had clouded her first months at Craigfast House. All that vitality which had flowed into her in Hungary – from the people, from the countryside, from Magdolna, from István – had seeped away. She was exhausted. She felt dispossessed. The busyness she tried to create in her life seemed a sham, and she saw herself like one of the last lingering fishermen of Dunmouth, casting and casting a net into the sea, but always hauling it up empty.

  She would visit
Linda. Time in her company would bring some comfort, but she could not speak to Linda about the things that were really troubling her, or about the wordless debate which raged continuously inside her.

  Kate felt disreputable as she walked into Harbour Steps Books. There were twigs and leaves in her hair and seeds of willow-herb and cleavers attached to her skirt, but luckily Linda had no customers. Toby sat down in the middle of the floor and panted meaningfully.

  ‘Hello, stranger,’ said Linda. ‘How did you know I was just going to put the kettle on? Yes, Toby, you can have a bowl of water and a biscuit.’

  ‘You’re going to have another dog to spoil soon,’ said Kate, following her into the big kitchen built on to the back of the cottage. ‘Can I nip into your bathroom and tidy up? I feel like the Guy Fawkes bonfire they used to build on the pebble beach.’

  ‘They still do. Not long now till Bonfire Night. What other dog?’

  ‘Tell you in a minute,’ said Kate, climbing the stairs and shutting herself into Linda’s elegant new bathroom.

  Over tea and shortbread, Kate explained about Stephen’s puppy.

  ‘What a good idea,’ Linda said. ‘With both girls away at college it will give him something positive to enjoy.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. And training the puppy will stop him becoming too obsessed with his exams.’

  ‘And how are you?’

  ‘All right, I suppose. I’m still not sure where we stand financially.’ Kate had told Linda a little, cautiously, about Tom’s redundancy and his difficult behaviour. She felt she could speak openly to Linda, who had been through a similar experience with her father – though Dan Wilson had come out fighting.

  ‘You’re going to have to sit down and work things out soon, you know. You say Tom is at least going out of the house now, instead of hiding. Perhaps he’s ready to cope with plans.’

  ‘Yes. I’m a coward. I’ve always hated confrontation and I’ve kept putting it off. But today I’ve been trying to get my courage up. I’m going to try to tackle him this evening.’