by Lilian Peake
It was while Elise was washing the cups in the little kitchen at the back that she heard a woman customer talking excitedly to Clare. Leaving the crockery to drain, she went to the door of the office and listened. What she heard stunned her so much she went straight into the shop.
The customer turned to her. ‘Isn’t it awful,’ she said, ‘have you heard - they’re cutting down Dawes Hall woods!’
Elise paled. ‘How do you know?’
‘I live just past the turning,’ she said, ‘and you’d have to be deaf not to hear the racket they’re making. Without any warning, too. There’s been a lot of people protesting about it, did you know?’
Dazed, Elise nodded. ‘I was one,’ she answered, and added slowly, ‘but it doesn’t seem to have done much good, does it?’
‘It’s old Alfred Kings again. Can’t trust the old so-and-so,’ she commented, picking up the batteries she had bought and taking the change which Clare was handing to her.
‘I can guess why he’s done it,’ Clare said, ‘to forestall any trouble from lawyers and so on. Didn’t Mr. Pollard say he was going to try to get a solicitor to issue, an injunction to stop the builder from doing anything pending a public enquiry?’
‘Clever old devil,’ the woman snorted as she went out of the door. ‘Trust him to think of a way round it.’
Clare looked at Elise. ‘Don’t take it so hard! The world hasn’t come to an end just because they’re cutting down a few trees.’
Elise shook her head. She couldn’t explain even to Clare, whom she was beginning to trust as she had trusted no other woman, what it meant to her to hear that those particular trees were being chopped down.
She looked at her watch. ‘At lunchtime,’ she promised herself, speaking aloud, ‘I’m going to have a look.’
‘The woman could have been wrong,’ Clare said soothingly. ‘She only heard a noise.’
‘I wish you were right, Clare, but something tells me you aren’t. If you had seen the mood Lester Kings was in last night…’ She shook her head. ‘At the moment, he’s capable of anything,’ she nearly added, ‘even murder,’ but restrained herself.
‘Tell me more,’ Clare said, intrigued.
‘Well, I don’t know whether I should tell you, but keep it to yourself’ - Clare promised that she would - ‘he spoke to his fiancée on the phone last night, and she ended the engagement.’
A shadow of pain passed across Clare’s face as if the thought of another’s suffering stirred memories of her own lost love. ‘Then I know how he feels,’ she said quietly.
But Elise could not see it that way. She could think only of his savage words, his renunciation of all women from that moment on, his dismissal of her sympathy when she had offered it. She could not be as generous as Clare towards him, not now, not when he was coldly and cruelly massacring the woods which had been part of her life since childhood and which held so many memories of bright untroubled summer days.
At lunchtime Clare said, ‘You go, Elise. I can see you can’t keep your mind off those woods. I’ll hold the fort until Mr. Pollard comes back.’
Elise gave her a grateful smile and went on her way. She walked quickly, her heart pounding with effort and anxiety. She crossed the railway line and as she trod up the hill, she heard the noise the woman had been talking about.
There was the whine of the machinery, the revving of the contractor’s lorries, the raised voices of men trying to communicate above the din. She passed the ruins of the old house and came upon entrance to the woods.
There was a series of shouts, a groaning sound as if someone was dying, a rending and a splitting as a great trunk seared the air, met the ground and bounced a little, like a body falling from a great height. Then it lay still, severed and dead.
She clutched at her scarf with frenzied fingers, her eyes staring, her breath short and panting. Nearby lay two more giants, prostrate and beyond help, broken off near the base, with only the stumps left to show where they had stood. There were young trees, dynamited and blown whole out of the ground, their roots, torn from the earth, reaching hopelessly upwards like supplicant arms, begging to be spared.
She watched, gasping, as a powered chain saw was placed against the trunk of a great beech. The high-pitched whine of the machinery as it started up filled her with a nameless dread, as though she was the one about to be cut down. She winced as the teeth of the saw cut a short way into the bole of the tree. Into the opposite side of the trunk, two men drove steel wedges and swung great hammers to force them home, and she felt the blows as though they were hitting her own body.
Her eyes turned aghast towards the sound of chopping. Her throat grew dry, her lips parched as it came to her what those men were doing. They were hacking at the branches of the hornbeam - the one she had got trapped in when Lester had brought her down. They were going to fell the hornbeam!
She became aware of voices nearby, but she did not wait to identify them. She made a convulsive movement forward, her legs advancing of their own accord. She had to stop those men, she had to stop them killing that tree!
She shrieked above the din, ‘Stop, stop!’ and rushed towards them.
There was a shout, but she disregarded it. She was in a fever of agony, she had to save the life of that tree…
Footsteps pounded behind her, an arm shot out and gripped her shoulder, swung her round and forced her to be still.
‘What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?’ Lester shouted his face white, his lips taut with anger and something else besides. ‘Do you want to kill yourself? Don’t you know you’re as good as committing suicide if you go in there now?’
He pulled her roughly towards the edge of the woods, but she shouted, ‘I don’t care!’ and struggled to free herself.
‘Murderer!’ she screamed. ‘You’re slaughtering those trees, you’re killing them, one by one …’ She shook herself out of his hold, and dived among the trees again, hysterical now and out of control.
There were shouts, warning shouts and a pounding of feet. An arm hooked itself chokingly round her neck and she was pulled backwards brutally and swung round and her head pushed down against a hard masculine chest. There was the rending sound again, the groaning and the splitting and the great unbearable thud as another tree hit the ground.
She heard the pounding of Lester’s heart beneath her ear, felt the cruel force of his hand on her head. Then he released her and his anger was at white heat. He shouted to the men to hold everything. Then he caught her face between bruising fingers and looked her straight in the eyes, compelling her to look at him.
‘You will get - off - this - site, Elise, and you will stay - off - this - site. So help me, if you don’t, and if I so much as catch you hanging around even on the fringes of these woods while this operation is in progress, as sure as I stand here I’ll call the police and have you arrested! Do you hear me?’
She did not answer. His hands went to her shoulders and he shook her, trying to make her reply, to show that she understood what he was saying. ‘Do you hear me, Elise?’
She made herself nod. He let her go and her head flopped forward like a new-born baby’s, as though it was too heavy for her neck to support. She raised it with difficulty and stared at him as if she had never seen him in her life before. In his safety helmet, in his navy belted working jacket and his thick rubber boots with the trouser legs tucked into the tops of them, he looked a stranger, a cold, ruthless stranger.
She walked away and began to sob uncontrollably. When she reached the bend in the road, she turned for a last look. He was standing there still watching her and her heart leapt at the sight of him.
She walked on until the woods, and Lester, disappeared from view. The sound of machinery faded away and all was as quiet as before. As she made her way home she told herself that it was the trees she had been weeping for, although in her heart she knew it was for Lester, too.
She sat as usual in her room that evening making a determined effort to re
ad, but she could not keep her mind on her book. She had tried listening to her records, but she hadn’t heard a note. She was agitated and uneasy, apprehensive in case Lester came.
She had asked Roland if he expected him, but he had been noncommittal. ‘He might,’ was all he would say.
When the doorbell rang, she felt a shock as though she had touched a live wire and got the full force of the mains.
She heard Lester ask, ‘Where’s your sister?’
‘Upstairs,’ was the answer.
‘Right,’ Lester said in a tight voice, and his footsteps took the stairs two at a time.
He walked straight in. She lifted her head sharply and looked at him. Useless to remonstrate with him, to tell him he should have asked permission, useless to say, ‘This is my room. Go out.’ He was there and had to be faced.
‘Well?’ he said. That was all. But it was enough.
She was silent, hoping he would go, but he stayed. She knew she had to find an answer. Her eyes faltered and fell away from his, but her words and her tone were belligerent.
‘If you think I’m going to say I’m sorry, then you’d better think again.’ Her head came up and she challenged, ‘You’re the one who should apologise.’ His eyebrows rose, partly in skepticism, partly in query. She bit out, ‘For the slaughter you instigated and were party to. For killing those trees.’
‘Oh. So I’m a murderer now, in addition to all my other “virtues”. Thanks.’ She looked away. ‘Tell me,’ he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and lounging against the wardrobe, ‘what did you have in mind to do this morning? Stage a sit-in? Do a melodramatic suffragette act and chuck yourself under the wheels of one of the contractor’s lorries? Or sit in the middle of it all until a tree crushed you - thus committing the final, noble, heroic act?’
She said through her teeth, ‘I should have known you’d be cynical.’ She stared at him, simmering. ‘The trouble with you, Lester Kings, is that you’ve got no feelings, no heart, no sentiment. You’re insensitive, ruthless and selfish.’ She was breathing hard, searching her mind for more derogatory adjectives with which to describe him.
‘Go on,’ he said, ‘it does me no end of good hearing your high opinion of me. Makes me really big-headed.’
‘All right, I will. No wonder your girlfriend jilted you. If I’d been in her shoes, I’d have done the same. You’re cold, hard and callous!’
He walked towards her slowly. ‘That’s enough! Let’s get one thing straight. You’re never likely to be in her shoes. No woman is ever going to be allowed to come that close to me again. Especially you.’ She could not raise her eyes and let him see the pain in them.
‘You take delight in hurting people,’ she mumbled, her attack petering out, ‘especially me.’
‘What do you think I should do to a woman who can’t let a day go by without telling me she hates me? Throw my arms round her neck and tell her I love her?’
Hate you? she thought. If only you knew, Lester, if only you knew.
‘Let me tell you something, Elise. I’ve got feelings all right, and I’ve got a heart, what my beloved ex-fiancée has left of it. Do you think I enjoyed standing there and seeing those trees go down? Do you think I have no memories of the place, and that when I see the trees falling one by one, I don’t feel that part of me is going with them?’
‘But, Lester,’ she whispered, ‘why …?’ Then she remembered. ‘Yesterday afternoon, was it you I saw in the woods - in the mist…?’
His tension left him and he looked down, pushing up the pile of the carpet with the toe of his shoe. ‘Yes. I saw you there, too. I didn’t speak to you. I wanted to be on my own, as I guessed you wanted to be.’
‘Then, Lester,’ she pleaded, hope flooding through her, ‘if you feel like that, why can’t you stop -‘
‘Out of the question.’ He straightened up. ‘My grandfather owns the land. My grandfather decrees that houses are to be built there. I’m working for him, so I follow his instructions. In any case,’ his tone altered, became resigned, ‘let’s face it, if Kings weren’t building there, then someone else would come along and do just that. The place was doomed.’
‘But, Lester, for the sake of the past…’
‘Sorry.’ His attitude had hardened again. She knew she had lost. ‘There’s no room for sentiment in business. The past is gone, Elise. It’s the future that matters now. People need houses, we’ve got to give them the houses they need.’
He was standing there, looking down at her, so near she could touch him. Yet, in reality, he was beyond reach.
‘Go on, say it. You hate me.’
He was goading her again and it set her teeth on edge. ‘All right, I hate you.’
He walked across to the chair, picked up the doll he had given her years before and thrust it in front of her. ‘Pull that apart. Tear it limb from limb. Imagine it’s me. Go on, get it out of your system. It’ll do you the world of good.’
She saw his baiting smile. He wandered to the door. She raised the doll to throw it at him, but he moved quickly and put the door between them. She hurled the doll all the same and it hit the wood paneling and dropped to the floor, the limbs splayed out supplicatingly like a fallen tree.
She ran across the room, picked up the doll, shook it savagely, then stopped, stared at it, at the pink and white gingham dress, grubby with age, at the blank appeal in the sightless eyes. Then with a despairing movement she lifted it and pressed it lovingly against her cheek.
CHAPTER 5
ELISE saw little of Lester for the next few weeks. She made a point of staying in her bedroom whenever he visited the house, and he never came to seek her out as he used to do.
After his warning, she had not dared to return to the woods. Whenever she tried to remember them as they used to be, she only succeeded in visualising the trees as she had seen them for the last time, mutilated, like bodies slaughtered in a massacre.
Whenever she caught a glimpse of Lester talking to Roland in the house, she longed to ask him what the woods looked like now, but her pride would not let her. She wondered whether he had recovered from his broken engagement. Roland never mentioned it and she did not like to ask him in case he told Lester.
One evening as she stood on the landing she heard him talking about the ‘site’, so she supposed it was all over and Dawes Hall woods were now a part of history. Her resentment against him returned with even greater strength, as though he and not his grandfather were the cause of all the trouble.
The depth of feeling he aroused in her whenever he came near, and her hatred of all that he had done in destroying something which had meant so much to her, were creating inside her a conflict that seemed destined never to be resolved while their paths continued to cross. Yet she knew that if he ever went away, part of her would go with him.
His return into her life had in itself changed her. By his very presence he had unwittingly broken down all the barriers she had carefully erected between herself and the world and she knew she could never go back to being the self-sufficient recluse she had been allowing herself to grow into before he came.
When Phil Pollard was told about the cutting down of the trees, he said Alfred Kings had not heard the last of it. He would consult a solicitor, he said. But Elise was sure that in his heart Phil acknowledged that Alfred Kings and his grandson had got the better of him and all the others who had joined with him in protest.
One morning Elise saw Clare looking through a new delivery of records.
‘My mouth’s watering,’ Clare said. ‘I’m wishing I had something to make music with. Some of these records are fabulous. Not that my taste’s very highbrow. All the same …’ She sighed and sorted them out to put on the shelves.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Elise asked. ‘I’d have invited you long ago to come and hear mine.’ ‘Good heavens, I haven’t got your taste for the classics.
Chopin is about as high as I go up the classical music ladder.’
‘I�
�ve got some lighter stuff among my “heavies”, as you would probably call them.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Are you busy tonight?’
‘If you mean busy doing nothing, yes.’ She frowned. ‘My life these days is one big unexciting blank.’
‘Then,’ Elise took her up eagerly, ‘would you come this evening?’
Clare’s eyes were suspicious. ‘Are you taking pity on me?’
‘Yes,’ answered Elise without hesitation, knowing it to be the answer Clare expected.
Clare’s face cleared at once and she laughed, her cheerfulness returning. ‘It’s a deal. What time?’
‘Seven o’clock?’
‘Right,’ said Clare, ‘seven it shall be.’
Trade became brisk after that. A woman came in to buy a record for her son. He had told her to listen to it on the headphones, she said, before she bought it. Clare showed her into one of the cubicles and left her.
A man came in to buy a record player and Elise took him upstairs to the hi-fi department and demonstrated one or two models. He bought the second one he heard and she told him she wished all her customers were as easy to please as he was. He went out gratified, saying he would have to go a long way to find someone as patient and knowledgeable as she was and he would call again soon.
Phil, who had heard the customer’s comments, said with a laugh, ‘You’ll soon be getting so big-headed, Elise, I’ll have to put up your wages!’ He shuffled with agitated fingers through the letters on the desk. ‘You - er - wouldn’t be free tonight, would you?’
‘Sorry, Mr. Pollard, no.’
‘Got a date?’ he asked, without looking up.
Hearing the sharpness in his voice she took pity on him.
‘Clare’s coming round.’
His smile was tinged with relief as she left him to serve another customer.
At lunchtime, Elise waited for a bus to take her into town. She looked at her watch, thinking the bus was late when a van drew up beside her. ‘Kings, Builders,’ it announced on the side. Below the name in smaller letters were the words, ‘Live like Kings in a Monarch house” - the slogan Alfred Kings had adopted years before as an advertising gimmick.