The Bloody Wood

by Michael Innes

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Martineau smiled with pleasure, and nodded gently. Whatever county she had been bred in, it was evident that her present part of this one was very dear to her. ‘Well, we have been taking, Charles and I, to going there again sometimes, just at about this time in the evening. You must none of you be offended if we vanish, perhaps tomorrow evening, perhaps the evening after. You will at least be in our thoughts.’

  ‘Grace means,’ Charles Martineau said, ‘that we shall be gossiping about you all quite shamelessly.’

  ‘As soon, that is, as we have got our breath – for the climb is a little hard. And it is only Friary who will stop us.’

  ‘Friary has instructions?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Oh, no. We like to think he knows nothing about it. But we see him pass – quite close by – and so punctually that it is like having a clock in the belvedere. Which is what I was saying when I started rambling. And then, you see, we come away, Charles and I. Usually together, but sometimes first one and then the other. For we like to show that we can be a little independent of each other still.’

  Grace Martineau stopped speaking – and upon her last words there succeeded a silence it might not have been easy to break. Tactfully, the nightingale ended it with another burst of song. They listened until there came a pause.

  ‘You know, until quite lately, we used to have kingfishers by the stream.’ Mrs Martineau spoke, this time, in a low voice, as if for Judith Appleby’s ear alone. ‘I am afraid we shan’t see them again. But the nightingales have come back, as I have longed for them to do.’ She leant forward, and touched Judith’s arm. ‘There…you see?’

  On one of the grassy paths issuing from the wood there had appeared the figure of Friary. His coat could certainly be distinguished as sitting well on him. He moved briskly and with a light tread. He might have been a son of the house, Appleby thought, who had been out and about some necessary business on the estate. One rather expected a hail from him or a casual wave.

  But, of course, nothing of the sort occurred. With his gaze decorously averted from his distant employers and their guests, Friary turned right, and disappeared round the back of the house.

  2

  The nightingale had ceased, and somewhere in the wood an owl was hooting, as if issuing a challenge to one of those feathered débats or wordy wrangles so tediously reported by medieval poets. If so, the nightingale was not taking it on, but now remained obstinately mute. One had to suppose that, belying its reputation for night-long activity, it had tucked its head under its wing and gone to sleep.

  This might have been judged the more perverse in the nightingale in that the setting was steadily becoming apter for the exhibition of its prowess. The moon had risen behind the wood, and in the park which lay beyond the forsaken garden not one but half a dozen moonlit cedars were invitingly untenanted. But only the owl hooted again; it was possible to hear a faint splash of water from the stream; it was possible to imagine that one heard, fainter still, a murmur which might have come from waves on a distant beach, but that in fact must come – if indeed it was there at all – from the encroaching city. And into the sky the city cast a dull red glow which the moonlight was now engaged in combating. Charne was a wholly man-made place; within sight of the house nothing more than an occasional weed or shrub or small sapling grew where it hadn’t been told to. Yet everything was sufficiently mature to approximate it to the order of nature – and this order the moonlight might now be felt as championing. It was with a sense of victory that one watched the hot red glare of urban life beaten back in the eastern sky. And already, except in shadowed places, it would be possible to see one’s footing clearly. Appleby, marking this, felt the attraction of the night. He was about to get up and stroll away, when Mrs Martineau broke the silence.

  ‘I am afraid I took no part in your game,’ she said. Her voice held a note of apology. ‘You must forgive me. My thoughts sometimes go far away.’

  ‘Our game, Grace?’ It had been after a baffled moment that Charles Martineau said this questioningly.

  ‘Remembering what the poets have said about the nightingale.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Judith Appleby said this. She had not spoken for some time. ‘Bobby and Diana were playing a game like that.’

  ‘And now I recall something I could have joined in with.’ Mrs Martineau’s voice could just be heard. Her strength nowadays seemed to come and go, and at times seemed barely sufficient for articulate speech. ‘I think it is from Keats,’ she said. ‘Didn’t somebody quote from Keats?’

  ‘I did,’ Diana said. ‘Before I got snubbed. It was the bit about “immortal bird”. I know that was right, because we did it at school. Keats wrote a whole poem just about a nightingale, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, dear, I think he did.’ Mrs Martineau spoke indulgently – as nearly everybody except Bobby Angrave did to Diana, who was undeniably not clever. ‘Only, my lines don’t come from that poem. I’m not sure where they come from.’

  There was a moment’s pause. For some obscure reason, nobody seemed eager to prompt Mrs Martineau to go on. But presently she did so of her own accord – and so quietly that she somehow gave no effect of quoting verse.

  ‘It is a flaw in happiness,’ Mrs Martineau said, ‘to see beyond our bourne. It forces us in summer nights to mourn. It spoils the singing of the nightingale.’

  This produced silence. It was a silence lasting until Diana spoke again – and with all the rashness of ignorance.

  ‘What’s a bourne?’ Diana asked.

  ‘Well, dear, it can be several things, I believe. For another of the poets, Shakespeare, it is that from which no traveller returns.’

  ‘Uncle Charles, I think I heard a car. Are we going to have visitors?’ Martine Rivière, a girl at once alert and curiously withdrawn, plunged into the talk. It was reasonable that she should feel diversion to be required hard upon her aunt’s having relapsed upon so uncomfortably sombre a note. But she hadn’t, as it turned out, chosen too well.

  ‘It must be Fell.’ Charles Martineau’s voice was barely steady. ‘He has formed the habit of dropping in of an evening. It’s on his way home – after doing a late round.’

  Gregory Fell, Appleby remembered, was the Martineau’s family doctor. He was a comparative newcomer to the district, and said to be a man of great ability. It would have been surprising, perhaps, if he had really become an intimate at Charne in the way that Martineau’s words suggested. But nobody was deceived. There was too evident a reason why the doctor should pay this evening visit – and why he should frequently appear at other times as well. Appleby wondered whether it was Martineau or Martineau’s wife who insisted upon this paper-thin convention of reticence. If Grace Martineau was to have sleep – it was painfully clear – Dr Fell must bring it to her.

  And now, almost with haste, the little party in the loggia was breaking up. The nightingale, should it think to resume its entertainment, would pour out its incredible strains in vain. Nor would the owl be attended to.

  ‘I think I’ll take a stroll in search of Angrave,’ Appleby said. Almost as if he were as young as Diana Page, he was finding intolerable for a moment the simple fact that somebody was going to die. Or at least he supposed that this was what he was feeling. Certainly he wanted a short spell of solitude before the final ritual assembly in the music room prior to bed-time. ‘There’s sufficient light,’ he said, ‘to track the young man down.’

  ‘Yes – do go. See what Bobby’s up to.’ Martineau, already on his feet, produced this rather oddly. ‘But don’t, either of you, be long.’ He paused, and seemed conscious that this was a strange circumscription to lay upon a guest – or upon a guest of Appleby’s seniority. ‘It’s turning damp,’ he said. ‘It’s turning chilly.’

  ‘Charles, dear – shall we go in together?’ Grace Martineau had stood up unaided, but with effort. With an air of whimsical
formality, she placed herself on her husband’s arm. But it was a support nobody could suppose her not to need. Together, husband and wife made their way slowly down the little colonnade joining the pavilion to the house. The others followed, trying to disguise the unnatural slowness of their progress by pausing to draw each other’s attention to this or that. Appleby caught his wife’s eye – and knew that Judith was asking herself, precisely as he was, whether all this ignoring of the spectre wasn’t a kind of madness that only the English can produce. Then he turned away, and walked across the terrace.

  It was a perfect night in early June. Dropping down from the level of the house, Appleby wandered for a time in the garden, or ghost of a garden, below. Bobby Angrave wasn’t at all on his mind, he found; indeed, he must have mentioned his name merely as an excuse for this quiet prowl. He even thought of making his way to the walled garden to the west of the house, and so ensure himself solitude – for Bobby had appeared to make his way into the wood on the east. But this might convict him of mild disingenuousness if he was questioned later, and for the time being he contented himself with lighting a cigar and strolling up and down where he was.

  Here, rather more clearly than in the loggia, one could hear the sound of running water. And here, too, that other and urban murmur from beyond the wood was indubitable. Marshalling yards and the clanking of heavy wagons over points, the miscellaneous traffic of city streets and suburban roads, sounds of industrial activity in factories where night shifts were working: all these went to produce this faint continuum that just touched the ear. Probably it touched the ears of the owls and the nightingales too, and they weren’t very happy about it. The owls would hold out longest; any summer, one felt, might be the last in which the nightingales would be guests at Charne. There was already ominous talk of a ‘development’, Appleby had been told, on the other side of the high road near the back of the house. That would finish the place as giving any illusion of rural solitude. What Keats called ‘the hum of mighty workings’ would have got hold, good and proper.

  Dipping into the English poets was catching. Nobody had announced that the nightingales were singing round the convent of the Sacred Heart – although in one glade in Charne Wood there was a little artificial ruin that might stand for that: a few broken arches and the like, over which ivy and honeysuckle appropriately climbed. Appleby turned round and gazed at the house. Quite a different impulse had been at work there. It looked uncompromisingly permanent, totally removed from the ravages of time. The impression didn’t come merely from its solidity, or even from its being in perfect repair. Its proportions were refined; were, one might say, a kind of mathematics in stone. And mathematics we know to be the one absolutely enduring thing.

  But if houses are to remain houses they must continue to be lived in. Appleby’s thought veered from these speculative ruminations into a more practical course. Who was going to go on living in Charne? There was no direct heir. During the lifetime of the present owner there never had been.

  Nor, it seemed, had there been such an heir through several lifetimes before that. He remembered Grace Martineau as telling him – it had been in one of her mildly depressive states, which she seemed to have taught herself to mitigate through the making of confidences – that when she had married Charles and he had brought her to Charne she had scarcely expected to bear him a child. And, sure enough, she had never done so. Yet her expectation had rested only on a fanciful foundation. Already for three generations, it seemed, no child had been born in the house. Whether it had always been a Martineau who had been brought in to fill the gap, Appleby didn’t know. A man sometimes has to change his name as well as his residence when he takes over such a place. Judith would have the facts. He must ask her.

  He found that he had come to a halt, and was looking down into one of the two great stone basins round which this garden, now forsaken, had been organized. There was no reason at all why it should not brim with clear water, support the delicate cups of water-lilies, afford adequate ooze and pasture for appropriately ornamental fish. Appleby suddenly saw that here was another gesture – unconsciously arrived at, it might be – by Martineau. A barren house. Empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

  Bother the poets, Appleby told himself. He made to turn away, proposing to retrace his steps to the house – for no doubt he had been absent for as long as was civil. As he did so, he became aware that by the farther verge of the second basin – at noon, as it were, to his own six o’clock – stood the figure of Bobby Angrave. For a moment they looked at each other, oddly silent, across the two wide saucers of stone.

  ‘Hullo!’ Bobby then said. ‘What about getting a hose and filling them up? A nice surprise for Uncle Charles in the morning.’

  3

  ‘It would take the whole night,’ Appleby said prosaically. Walking over to Bobby Angrave, he added: ‘And your uncle might not be all that amused.’

  ‘It would take a lot to amuse Uncle Charles at present, poor devil.’ Bobby didn’t stir from where he stood; he seemed fascinated by the great empty basin. ‘It’s all pretty grim, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t suppose your aunt can hold on for long – or that one would wish her to.’

  ‘Can the old man? That seems to me the question.’

  ‘Your uncle?’ Appleby was surprised. ‘He isn’t ill too, is he?’

  ‘Good Lord, no.’ Bobby had given an impatient shake of his head. It was an irritable – and irritating – mannerism of his when he judged people to be not as quick as they ought to be. ‘The old boy has twenty years to go. And that’s just the point. How will he fill them, face them? They’ve been, you know, so fearfully close – Aunt Grace and he. The thing’s driving him mad.’ Bobby broke off, picked up a tiny pebble, and dropped it into the basin. ‘The parapet’s curiously low, isn’t it? An unnoticeable six inches. If it was full, in you could go in the dark and drown. As it is, you could break your neck.’

  ‘I hardly think so – though it mightn’t be good for an arm or a leg.’ Appleby glanced at the young man curiously. ‘Of course, your aunt’s illness is a tremendous strain on your uncle. But I don’t think he’ll go mad, or even in any way crack up. Somehow people don’t – or not until afterwards.’

  ‘Perhaps so.’ Bobby picked up another pebble, made to throw it, thought better of this, and dropped it on the path. ‘But – do you know? – I can hardly stick it myself. That’s why I made off just now, and took a turn in the wood. As for sitting down and writing a lot of damned Latin verses, the idea’s absurd.’

  ‘I think you ought to try not to take it that way.’ Appleby saw that Bobby Angrave was disturbed, and he obeyed an older man’s impulse in such cases to hint some lesson of maturity. ‘There’s always something to be said, Bobby, for just getting on with the job. Particularly if one can do it well, and if one likes it.’

  ‘I can do it well, all right.’ Bobby tossed this in contemptuously. ‘But what sense is there in such tricks – here and now in the twentieth century? Absolutely none that I can see. That classical stuff is totally irrelevant. It simply turns its back on all the significant growing-points of our time.’

  ‘I agree that there’s an argument there.’ Appleby had refrained from smiling at Bobby’s rather portentous vocabulary. ‘But why, in that case, are you turning yourself into a classical scholar?’

  ‘Because I have a bloody great hole in my head, sir. That’s why. A hole where the sums should be.’

  ‘The sums?’

  ‘The substantial mathematical ability without which no scientific mind can tick. That leaves, you see, Greek and Latin, along with the ridiculous parlour game they call philosophy, as the only royal road in the rat race.’

  ‘At least you’re on that royal road?’

  ‘Of course. My elegant Latinity, and what-not, will get me a fellowship – or into the Civil Service, absurdly enough, if I choose to go that way. But there
’s nothing more to it.’

  ‘I see.’ Bobby Angrave, it seemed to Appleby, possessed, after all, a fairly substantial power of absorbing himself in his own affairs.

  ‘But that’s not the point at the moment.’ It was almost as if Bobby had divined Appleby’s thought. ‘Here’s a woman going to die – quite naturally, and when she is on at least the fringes of old age. There ought to be nothing to it. Yet I feel a kind of animal terror when I think of it. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I know what you mean by the animal terror.’

  ‘Does one go on experiencing it – after one has more or less had one’s life? Or is it something only the young really feel, because death would cheat them of so much more?’

  ‘They believe that death would cheat them of a great deal. But that may be an illusion.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Bobby gave his impatient headshake again. ‘But it doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I think it’s a matter of degree, in point both of frequency and intensity. But I’ve known very old people who were steadily and horribly afraid to die.’

  ‘We’d better go back to the house. This is getting morbid.’ Without waiting for a response, Bobby strode off towards the terrace. But within a dozen yards he had halted again, and waited for Appleby to catch up with him. ‘Do you believe in euthanasia?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s hardly a matter for belief or disbelief. It’s obvious people ought to be got out of the world without intolerable suffering, whenever possible. And that may entail getting them out a little quicker than otherwise might be.’

  ‘There’s clearly nothing in being dead.’ Bobby was moving forward again, but slowly. ‘All the old commonplaces are right there. We cease to be fortune’s slaves, nay cease to die, in dying. And so on.’