The Song of Hartgrove Hall

by Natasha Solomons

  In the end it was Edie who saved herself. I heard her voice in my head – calm and soft, saying one of those things she always said: ‘There’s no point simply scolding them. Distract them.’

  So I did the only thing I could. I went over to the piano, sat down and started to play. Leopold Mozart’s Toy Symphony tumbled from my fingers. It took me a minute to realise that Robin was absolutely still. He dropped the photo album and walked over to the piano, shedding the sequinned ball gown en route, until he stood quietly beside me in nothing but his Superman underpants. I didn’t have the requisite whistle to hand for the piece, so I drummed out a rhythm on the piano lid. Robin joined in the second time, tapping the seat of the piano stool, repeating the beats precisely.

  ‘Jolly good!’ I cried.

  I continued to play, this time singing the part of the nightingale with my left hand. Robin shuddered, stared at my fingers and then quickly at me. At the end of the movement, I paused. Robin tugged my hands back to the keys.

  ‘Again, Grandpa. Again.’

  ‘All right.’

  I started the nightingale section once more but, after a bar or two, Robin placed his hands over the keys, an octave above my own, and then to my absolute astonishment he began to play alongside me, shadowing the melody in absolute rhythm and time. I stopped, amazed, but the little fellow continued on alone until the end of the movement, not missing a note.

  ‘You’ve played this before?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you’ve had piano lessons? Music lessons?’

  He shook his head, impatient. ‘Again, Grandpa. Again.’

  ‘All right. But perhaps you could put your trousers on first?’

  He watched me for a moment, considering the request.

  ‘Afterwards.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And so we played again. Me seated upright on the piano stool and Robin standing beside me in his underpants, only just able to reach the keys. I glanced over at his fingers and saw how the melody slipped from his fingertips, easy as water, and I observed what beautiful hands he had – small, still a child’s hands, but with the long fingers of a real pianist. He looked at me and, for the first time I could remember, he smiled, and it was a drunken smile of beatific joy.

  New Year’s Day, 1947

  The following morning dawns colder still. The channels of condensation on the inside of the windowpanes in my bedroom have frozen fast. Even lying in bed in my clothes I shiver. Deciding to give up on sleep, I sling on a dressing gown and, grabbing a blanket off my bed for good measure, hurry downstairs in search of a cup of tea or a glass of whisky – anything to warm me up. I’ve always liked being the first awake in a house full of sleepers. I know that one day Hartgrove Hall, along with her third-rate furniture and mouldering pictures, her farms and rivers, will go to Jack, but in those moments before anyone else is awake, she is mine. Even when he is master of the house and married with fat children squabbling through the halls, he won’t be able to inherit these moments. As a boy on my first morning home from prep school for the holidays, I’d get up before it was light and revisit every room, staying long enough to throw off the sensation of unfamiliarity, the stranger returned. I’d stray outside onto the lawn in my pyjamas and bare feet, feeling the dew between my toes, and watch dawn fire along the river.

  I hurry into the kitchen and find to my regret that I’m not the earliest riser this morning. Chivers is trying to shoo George and Edie from the kitchen. Before the war none of us would have dared to venture this side of the green-baize door. We may not have had the staff nor the wealth of our pals, but we kept up the pretence as the least we could do. The upstairs might have been very nearly as shabby as the downstairs, but we maintained the illusory barrier. It was expected, after all. Now, by silent accord, Jack, George and I simply can’t do it any more. There’s a shortage of bedders at Cambridge, so it seems perfectly ridiculous to pretend that I can’t brew a simple pot of tea. Standards have fallen, and Chivers and the General are the only ones who wish to see them reinvigorated.

  ‘Sir, miss, I believe you’d be much more comfortable in the morning room. I’ll ask one of the dailies to light a fire.’

  Chivers attempts to conceal the note of pleading in his voice but he’s the last man standing in Camp Civilisation and it’s been overrun by us Champions of Informality, and he knows it.

  George waves him off. ‘They won’t be in for ages yet, Chivers. It’s bloody freezing in the morning room and it’s toasty by the range.’

  The aged butler sighs and retreats to the far side of the kitchen. It’s true. The daily girls won’t be in for an hour at least. Gone are the days when fires were lit before the family ventured downstairs.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Chivers,’ calls Edie. ‘It’s very kind of you. We don’t mean to put you out.’

  For the first time, I grasp that she isn’t quite one of us. She doesn’t realise that her polite apology, her ‘Mr Chivers’, will be taken by the man as an affront to his dignity.

  ‘Tea?’ asks George, hunting for the kettle, and at that poor Chivers withdraws to his pantry, unable to bear witness to standards having slipped so far that one of the young masters is brewing his own pre-breakfast cup.

  ‘Oh, good morning, Fox,’ says George, spying me at last. ‘Bloody cold, isn’t it. I went for a piss and the bloody bog’s frozen solid.’ He pauses, remembering Edie. ‘Sorry.’

  She waves away his concern and shudders with cold. Looking down, I see that she’s wearing several pairs of Jack’s old army socks and no shoes.

  ‘Here, have this,’ I say, offering her the blanket.

  ‘I’ll share it with you,’ she says and comes to stand right beside me, draping the blanket around both our shoulders. I’m acutely aware that I haven’t washed since early yesterday and I smell of brandy and fags.

  ‘Have you seen Jack?’ I ask.

  Edie smiles. ‘He’s still asleep. He can sleep through anything. Bombs. Irate landladies. Arctic bedrooms.’

  I glance at George and try to appear nonchalant and sophisticated, taking in that Edie has admitted not only to sleeping with Jack – which we suspected – but to having actually shared his bedroom here at Hartgrove Hall. I’m torn between dizzying, hopeless envy of Jack and intrigue. I hope she’s more guarded around the General or the morning will be very interesting indeed. It was jolly good luck that Chivers had made his exit before her confession or he’d have dashed straight upstairs and told him everything. There are no secrets between those two. They’re worse gossips than the old women in the village.

  The three of us lurk beside the ancient range, watching the light ripen through the high kitchen windows. I want to go outside onto the terrace, watch the morning slink across the white fields and count the sets of footprints dimpling the lawn, then choose a journey to follow into the hills – a deer, or a hare perhaps – but I don’t want to break the spell. I like standing here with George and Edie, my back warm from the range fire, the gurgle and hiss of the boiler. It’s a comfortable quiet, an orchestrated rest between notes, and automatically I count the beats. Edie’s laugh punctures the pause.

  ‘Are you counting time, Fox?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘He’s always done it,’ says George, laughing. ‘Conducts us all like we’re a ruddy orchestra.’

  ‘I don’t. I’m marking time to something I hear in my head.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No. It’s not the same thing at all. I don’t even mean to do it.’

  Edie’s staring at me and she doesn’t find it funny. ‘What are you hearing now, Fox?’

  Suddenly self-conscious, I don’t hear anything any more. The silence rings and the moment is quite broken.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ I say.

  As I leave the
kitchen I hear George making jovial remarks about the cold and the likelihood of my freezing my balls off. I wish that for once he could remember he was talking to a girl and not to Jack or me or some fellow in the mess.

  —

  Snow has fallen through the night and in the early light the gardens and hills glint a weird and unearthly white. The lake is frozen solid, its surface a flawless expanse. The slate sky stoops low, brimming with snow yet to come. The cold is fierce and I can hear the creak of ice. The trees are ringed with white, branches tinselled with hoarfrost. Her imperfections concealed by the fresh blanketing, the house and garden appear as elegant as a debutante. The white lawns are smooth and perfect, the weed-strewn beds quite hidden. The broken statues on the loggia appear to float, lost in some kind of macabre, injured dance.

  I’m pierced by longing – if only the house could always be like this. When we were children, Jack and George used to tell me that before Mother died the gardens looked rather smart. Then the formal ponds had not been drained nor their stone linings smashed, but were kept stocked with squirming golden fish. The lawns were rolled and cut every other week. They teased me with stories of summer drinks parties on the loggia where Mother held court; the General had even been known to laugh and neglect to wax his moustache. It all seemed frightfully unlikely – a distant bedtime story – and I’d once made the mistake of telling them so, at which they’d closed ranks and stopped talking about that time altogether.

  And yet perhaps it’s out of kindness that they don’t talk about her any more, not wanting to rub it in that they remember her and I don’t. I know they pity me for not having any memory of our mother. I was barely three when she died – from complications arising from diabetes. The truth is that I’m sorry for them. They know what was lost. They remember the house and those days before the fall. The present can only ever be some sort of sad imitation. For me it’s a relief not to be weighted with such sorrow and regret. I don’t miss her. I have no memories of grief.

  At the far end of the garden, the ugly corrugated Nissen huts erected by the army are buried under a foot of snow so that they’re more like witches’ cabins. Mist hovers like steam above the river. I’m cold from standing still and, shaking the stiffness from my arms, I stomp across the lawn. I want to be the first one to mark it. It’s a childish satisfaction – like dashing red crayon across a white page. This morning a fox has beaten me to it; there are the slinking pads of his feet and here the tick-tick tracks of a bird. Then I notice footprints. Someone with small feet has been out before me this morning. I picture Edie standing in damp socks beside the range and I wonder whether it was her. I decide it must have been and choose her tracks to follow. It feels strange to trace a person’s journey rather than that of a fox or a hare, a little like spying. I suspect she wouldn’t like it, but somehow this doesn’t stop me.

  Her footsteps travel straight across the lawn towards the shrubbery and then, rather than slip-sliding down towards the river, she veers sharply upwards towards the ridge of the hill. Her prints are even and steady – she seems to know precisely where she’s going and she hardly ever pauses to catch her breath or to stop and admire the view. After a mile or so, I’m surprised – she’s travelled quite a distance. I stood beside her in the kitchen watching the dawn less than an hour ago so she must have been out walking through the dark.

  I trace her into the woods. Half the trees were felled for fuel during the war – but the oldest part remains. Great thick-trunked Durmast oak and slim alders stand silent amidst the endless white, masts of an armada adrift on an arctic sea. I like the sensation of being alone amongst the trees but this morning I’m uneasy. The snow has muffled the world – I hear a rook call echoing through the trees but it’s distorted and strange.

  I nudge further into the heart of the wood. The glare of snow and the clear, leafless sky makes it weirdly bright, brighter than the boldest summer’s day. There are no berries left on the branches; the birds have picked them clean. It seems that all colour has leached out of the landscape and then I glimpse the streak of a fox’s brush, a smear of orange on white, as it slides between the trunks and vanishes. It’s more sheltered in the wood than out on the bare back of the hill, and the trees themselves dispense a tiny sliver of living warmth. The bracken and brambles grow more thickly the deeper I go and I struggle to trace Edie’s footprints. I lose her for a minute under the greenish shade of a yew, only to find her again in the well of a badger path, then she’s gone again. I cast about but can see no more footprints. It’s as though she’s walked out into the woods and disappeared.

  Irritated now with the game, I turn for home, ready for a decent breakfast and a pot of coffee. I have an unpleasant sensation of being watched, that something is waiting out of sight. I hum a Bizet ditty to drive away the feeling but my voice is thin. I don’t want to look for more prints. I don’t want to know what I might find. I’m well on the way to frightening myself and I’m angry at how ridiculous I’m being, brimming with schoolboy terrors.

  Suddenly I hear a crashing nearby and my blood is electric, stinging through my veins. I start to run, leaping over felled stumps and knotted roots, but I’m not as fast or as fit as I’d like. Yesterday’s brandy bubbles up into my throat and pools there, burning. I’m forced to slow, and then stop. I bend over, wondering whether I’m going to be sick. I hear the jangle of bells. Rushing bodies smash through the undergrowth. My heart thunders in my ears. Slamming myself flat against a beech trunk, I look up to see half a dozen men weaving through the wood, great pairs of antlers strapped to their shoulders, encasing them like a cage. Others join them. At the sight of me, they halt.

  ‘Happy New Year, young Master Fox-Talbot,’ says one, reaching up to touch his cap, but on finding only antlers he chuckles.

  I remain leaning against the beech, quite spent, adrenalin seeping away. ‘And to you all. I’d quite forgotten you’d be coming. You gave me quite a scare, I must say.’

  At that the men roar with laughter, clearly delighted.

  ‘It’s a good thing, to have yer all back in the big house, sir,’ says a cheery fellow, and I wonder whether our principal role is to provide entertainment for the village.

  ‘We’re jist on our way to the Hall.’

  ‘You go on. I’ll follow in a minute. Don’t start without me.’

  ‘Right you are, young sir.’

  I watch for a minute as they weave through the holly and ash, somehow managing not to tangle their antlers in the branches, the bells strapped to their ankles crying out shrilly as they run. I follow them, emerging from the wood to see them careering down the slope, half men, half stags, racing through the snow. I’m struck with nostalgia for things I’ve never known. I yearn for a world unmapped, filled with hidden places and wild things, where there are still dark places concealed deep in the woods where people dare not go. A place of long-forgotten songs.

  We all gather in the porch to watch them. Jack is thick with sleep. He’s wearing his overcoat but the blue stripes of his pyjamas are still visible underneath and the effect is natty. I expect he’s about to start another trend. His arm is draped around Edie and they’re sharing a cigarette. The General is washed, shaved and immaculately dressed in his uniform, although I can’t imagine why. Several girls and a couple of chaps have slept here after the night’s festivities and they shake with cold, bleary-eyed, in last night’s party clothes and borrowed boots, wondering what on earth they’ve been summoned outside to witness.

  I’m restless with excitement. This is the first horn dance since the war. Or the first we’ve been here to witness, at any rate. I’m curious as to whether the villagers carried on doing it without us. It seems rather presumptuous to assume they stopped simply because we weren’t here to watch and tip them a few shillings. There are twelve men, six of them shouldering the vast pairs of antlers, and one holding an accordion. They stand on the white lawn in their hobnailed boots, half human, half
animal, pawing at the snow, waiting.

  At last, with a nod from the leader, the accordion player strikes up. It’s an uncanny tune and one I don’t recognise. The dancers pause for a moment, seeming to sniff the air before they move into the dance, slipping into serpentine patterns. The knock of boots on the iron ground is a counterpoint to the melody. The pace quickens into a clattering run, and they break apart into two lines, surging forwards and then back again, horns scoring the sky but never touching one another.

  I study the leader, our gardener Benjamin Row, who sports the largest pair of antlers, which are so knobbled and ancient, so black and solid, that they look more like stone than horn, and I speculate about the beast who shed them. It seems impossible that such a creature haunted the woods in this green and pleasant county of smooth hills and dappled woods. Despite the cold, fat beads of perspiration speckle Benjamin’s forehead and drop onto the snow. The dancers shout and stamp, and the wail of the accordion oozes around us and drifts out into the morning, sinking towards the river where it will be carried out to sea.

  The dance is hypnotic and strange. I turn to see what Edie is making of it all and I observe that her face is flushed, her eyes bright, her expression rapt. Jack is proffering her his cigarette but she doesn’t notice and, when she does, she bats away his arm. Jack stifles a yawn and I turn back to the dance suffused with irritation.

  The lawn is a churned-up mass of grubby white as the horn-men alternate back and forth in their two lines, grunting and red faced from exertion. I watch them surge and fall and it seems to me that they’re slipping forward and then further back in time, back and back towards the beginning of things. I picture the woods rise up and bloom across the hills, until the back of Hartgrove Hill is darkly forested. The ground cracks open to swallow up the few houses and the pins of light from their windows blink into nothingness. The music is a heartbeat that thrums inside me.