Fantails

by Leonora Starr

  “No, thank you. I enjoy the air. What time is breakfast?”

  “Mary takes it in at nine. It’s just struck eight.”

  Although she might have lingered for another half-hour in bed, the most deliciously comfortable bed in her experience, Logie felt restless, and the keen air blowing through the open window was exhilarating. So when she had drunk her tea she rose and dressed, and then regretted it, for it was barely half-past eight, and to go downstairs so soon might be tactless—Mary and Elsie would probably be busy in the drawing-room and library, sweeping and dusting, so that the visitor would be far from welcome. And though she longed to go out, she wanted Sherry to be with her when she saw the garden for the first time. Flinging the window wider still, she leaned out at the same moment that Sherry, in riding-breeches and an old tweed jacket, came round the corner of the house, his dogs, as usual, padding behind. She hailed him joyfully. “Sherry!”

  “Hullo,” He looked pleased. “I say, you’re an early bird!”

  “Not so early as you are, apparently!”

  “Oh, I’ve been riding. Sleep all right?”

  “Splendidly.”

  “Like to see the garden before breakfast?”

  “Love to!”

  “Come along down, then.”

  He was waiting for her in the hall. Logie wrinkled up her nose and sniffed exaggeratedly. “How nice you smell!” she told him.

  “Do I? What of?”

  “Harris tweed and horse and out-of-doors.” She added, as he pulled her close, “And shaving soap.” As Sherry bent his head her arms slid up and round his neck. “Oh, darling, I’m so happy!” she murmured. He took her gently by the shoulders, holding her away from him, looking at her intently. “Then for God’s sake go on being happy, sweet!” Puzzled, her eyes searched his. “What do you mean?” He laughed it off. “Just what I said. I want you to go on loving it all. Me and Crail and Yorkshire. Don’t get tired of us!”

  She drew away from him. “What an odd thing to say. Surely you don’t think I’m as fickle as all that! To get ‘tired’ of you, like a half-worn dress!”

  “I didn’t mean it, darling. It was just one of those silly things one says ... You know, sometimes one’s almost—well, afraid of being too happy.”

  She nodded. “Yes. But I shouldn’t have thought you’d ever feel like that. You always seem so confident.”

  “Didn’t they tell you when you were at school that you shouldn’t judge a book by its jacket? This crude exterior conceals the sensitive nature of a—er—a shy gazelle. Come on, or we’ll be late for breakfast and I’m starving!”

  Hand in hand they went out into the bright morning. Already in the keen air was a hint of autumn; Logie was glad she had put on her new tweeds, thanks to Elsie’s warning. Skirting the house, they took a path that crossed a lawn, passing an ancient cypress and a huge weeping-willow trailing grey-green fringes to the ground. “I used to play that was my tent and hide inside when I was little,” Sherry told her. So they came to a wrought-iron gate set in a high grey wall. Inside, they were surrounded by berry bushes enclosed in cages of wire netting, and rows of vegetables screened by apple-trees trained along wires. It was typical of the garden of a large country house; there were pears and plums and apples on the walls, behind wide flower borders where red admirals and purple emperors were busy among the michaelmas daisies. Half a dozen hives stood in a sunny corner. A range of hothouses entirely filled the length of the wall opposite the gate.

  Two men were digging; a third was wheeling a large barrow piled with cabbage-stalks towards a wooden door in the wall. Sherry hailed him. “ ’Morning, MacLaren! Everything all right?”

  “Good morning, sir! Everything’s fine.”

  “Come and do the honours, then, for Miss Selkirk. This is far more your domain than mine! Logie, this is MacLaren. During the war he and a couple of land girls grew enough stuff here to feed half the North Riding!”

  MacLaren’s dour face broke into a reluctant smile. “I doubt Mr. Sherry’s a wee thing inclined tae exaggerate!” he said to Logie. “But the lasses werena bad workers, far from it. I was real sorry when they went. One of them’s married the policeman. She gives us a hand yet with the berry picking. What will I show you first? The hothouses?” When, twenty minutes later, they sat down to breakfast, which consisted of eggs and home-cured bacon from the farm, Logie’s head was brimming with confused impressions of fragrant steamy warmth, vines heavy with green and purple grapes, velvety peaches nestling in their leaves against the wall, great banks of begonias and calceolarias.

  Vee came down late. “Good morning, darlings!” Lightly as she blew a kiss in Logie’s direction, another towards Sherry. “Monstrous of me to be late on your first morning!”

  “When were you otherwise?” Sherry teased her.

  “Now, Sherry! Let’s give Logie an impression of harmonious family relations, for a beginning, even if we can’t keep it up! I’ve been doing a lot of telephoning from my bed—that’s what delayed me. This evening we’ve got the Joiceys and the Fulboroughs and various other people coming about six-ish to meet Logie. To-morrow the Selby-Faucetts want you to go to there to a moonlight treasure hunt.”

  Logie said it all sounded very gay.

  “Gay? Oh, my dear, when I remember what it used to be! House-parties for the hunt balls and the shooting, endless dinners and cocktail parties, parties to the repertory theatre in York and supper after, point-to-points and racing ... And now most people pig it in a corner of their houses because they either can’t get or can’t afford servants. Most of the gardens are run on market-garden lines to help to pay the rates. Elizabeth and Rodney Sawdon, who were here last night, work hard growing poultry and mushrooms and tomatoes and goodness only knows what else. What the world’s coming to, I don’t know!”

  “I wonder,” Logie said, “if people don’t perhaps enjoy their fun all the more, when they have it, for working between times? I should have thought an entirely idle life must be so monotonous!” Then, remembering that Vee, though she had office work for the Red Cross during the war, did nothing now except enjoy herself, she changed the subject, asking some question about the home farm. “I’ll take you round it after breakfast,” Sherry promised her.

  On their way out he took her to a room behind the library, furnished as an office, where once or twice a week the agent came to deal with business pertaining to the estate. Two younger men worked under him; between them they were responsible for the running of several other places, all of them larger than Crail. ‘They’ve got plenty of work on hand, so I’m not doing anyone out of a job in taking over Crail myself,” he told her. “I was taking over on the first of October, but now I’ve told them I’d like them to carry on till we come back from our honeymoon. Until then I can be gradually picking up the threads. Ready now to see the farm? It’s about half a mile from the house. Like to walk or would you rather go in the car?”

  Logie elected to walk. A path circled the garden wall and on its far side joined a cart road between low walls where brambles grew. This took them to the farm, which was run nowadays by one man, whose wife attended to the hens and dairy work. Here were produced butter and milk enough to supply Crail, and also the families of the gardeners, groom, and gamekeeper.

  “They all keep their own hens,” Sherry explained; “we only keep enough for the house. Mrs. Collie hasn’t time to manage more ... Once I’ve got into the hang of running the estate I want to take on another man, and gradually build up a small T.T. Jersey herd. There’s enough room to start with. Later, we might build on another byre.”

  She said, as they began their walk back to the house, “Sherry, I’ve been thinking. When we’re married, your job is going to be running the estate. I want a job too. I couldn’t do nothing but arrange the flowers and order meals, just because we’re lucky enough to have money to pay people to do the housework. I’d be so bored! Besides, in times like these, I should feel guilty too. Couldn’t I grow food? Couldn’t I have henhouses i
n that field beside the house?”

  Sherry was doubtful. “They’d be an awful tie, wouldn’t they?”

  “Well, what’s the matter with a tie? I think it’s rather good for one—a sort of anchor.”

  “D’you know anything about hens?”

  “A lot. We’ve always kept them ourselves, and for three years in the war Alison and I between us looked after some for a man who went into the Navy. He’d built up a good strain and didn’t want to lose it. We averaged nearly two hundred and forty eggs per bird per year over the three years.”

  “Whew! That was good going!”

  “I used to read it up. We took a poultry paper. I’d like to have two pens—Light Sussex and some sort of cross. The Light Sussex cockerels would be grand for fattening. And Sherry, couldn’t we grow vegetables in the greenhouses in winter, instead of cinerarias and bulbs and all that sort of thing? MacLaren said there was enough fuel to carry on with.”

  Sherry had begun to be infected with her enthusiasm. “Your eggs would have to go to a government packing station, but they’d be helping the national larder. We could send vegetables once a week to Darlington or Harrogate in the Ford van. We’d get a petrol allowance for that, all right.”

  “And cockerels and boiling hens! Think what a boon they’d be to people in towns! We needn’t sell them we could send them to friends. People living alone—they find it desperately hard to manage on their rations. And people who have children. And people who’ve been ill. Do you remember that taxi-driver in London, who looked so miserable that we asked him what was wrong, and his wife had been ill and he couldn’t feed her up, so we got their address and Alison sent them some eggs? Think how we could help people like that! Oh, Sherry—it will be fun!”

  As she washed her hands before lunch, Logie thought that with every passing day her happiness grew. Only a little over a month ago it had seemed as though her life must run for ever in the same narrow, uneventful groove. And now the groove had widened into a broad, open highway, from which all manner of exciting prospects could be seen. And if the present was one long succession of new delights, what of the future, when she would be Sherry’s wife, sharing with him all manner of joys? The bliss of belonging to each other, this lovely home with all its luxury and beauty, the fun of passing on some of their happiness to those who were less fortunate ... later, perhaps, a nursery ... She thought: It’s almost too much. Almost more than I can bear. It’s almost frightening!

  Suddenly, with a queer pang of foreboding, she remembered Sherry’s strange expression when he had said to her this morning: “For God’s sake go on being happy, sweet! ... I want you to go on loving it all. Me and Crail and Yorkshire. Don’t get tired of us!”

  Why had he looked like that, spoken like that, as though he were afraid or had some ugly premonition?

  Then she reassured herself. Of course, it was because he had felt then as she felt now, that so much happiness was overwhelming, almost too good to be true. Probably everybody felt like that in the first rapture of loving and being loved.

  Presently, with a radiant heart, she went down to the library, where Sherry had said he would be waiting for her. She had quite forgotten the faint cloud that had hovered for a moment in the bright skies of her happiness.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The first faint shadows of the dusk were gathering in the living-room of Fantails. There were red roses in a copper bowl on the round polished table; their sweetness mingled with the fragrance from the garden, which came floating through the open windows with the harsher, haunting odours of the river.

  Hugh glanced about the room, then put a couple of cushions at one end of the low, deep window-seat. “Sit here and put your feet up.” Alison obeyed, finding it oddly pleasant to be ordered about. He adjusted a third cushion deftly behind her head. “That comfortable?”

  “Very!” She had enough vanity to be glad she wore the ivory frock with the red ships; it looked well against the deep-blue cushions. “Where are you going to sit?” she asked him. Hugh pulled up an armchair. She smiled at him, amused. “Your sickroom training has made you handy about the house!”

  He looked at her enquiringly. “Meaning?”

  “The way you arranged the cushions. And you’ve put the chair where I can look at you without having to move my head.”

  “Oh, that!” He laughed. “Surely that’s ordinary common sense ... Alison, I’m worried about John.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I’m rather glad you are. I was afraid that perhaps being so close to him might make it difficult for you to see him in perspective.”

  “It probably has. That’s why I want to talk it over with you. You are far more likely than I to see the situation clearly.” He looked so troubled that she said consolingly, “I do think that he’s looked far less fragile in the last week or two.”

  “Yes. And he’s put on weight. But it’s not only that he’s fragile. It’s his attitude. No child of John’s age who has been loved and kindly treated always ought to be afraid of everything, as he is.”

  “No. I’m afraid he shouldn’t.”

  “You saw this evening how he reacted to what Lucia said about the kitten carrying germs. And then again that business about bogies.”

  “And ‘if you don’t have proteins you might get to be a famine child’ and ‘if you don’t eat up your vegetables you’ll get sore red places on your skin.’ ”

  “And yesterday when I had him with me in the car he slid down on the floor when we were passing a policeman. I asked why, and he said policemen knew everything about you, they were just about as clever as God! It’s all wrong ... I wish you’d tell me honestly what you put it down to.”

  Alison hesitated. Here was the opportunity she had longed for, the opening to tell Hugh of the bad effect Lucia’s domination was in her opinion having on John. Yet now it had come she scarcely liked to take it, since to do so seemed like telling tales of Lucia behind her back. She said, “You’re on the spot and John is your child. Surely you’re a far better judge of that than I am!”

  “Not necessarily. There’s a saying, ‘The onlooker sees most of the game.’ When one is in the game one misses quite a lot of what is going on. That’s why I’ve called you in to have a consultation.”

  “It’s a tremendous compliment. The nicest compliment you could possibly have paid me. If you really want my opinion, I’m sure the root of all the trouble is that Lucia loves John in the wrong way—possessively. She doesn’t want him to be happy in his way, but in hers. She wants to have him turn to her for everything—for happiness, for safety. She, and no one else, must be the source of all his pleasures—that’s why she didn’t like my giving him the kitten! I’ve only just realised why she was so against it. And she threatens him with danger so that he’ll turn to her for protection. That’s why she sows the seeds of fear in his mind. Aunt Lucia won’t tell the nasty policeman, after all, that he was naughty. Aunt Lucia will give him the right things to eat. She’ll save him from the germs. I’m certain that’s her unconscious motive, though I’m sure she has the best intentions in the world and would be simply horrified if you told her she was harming John.”

  “One couldn’t tell her. If one did, she’d simply say that it was nonsense, caused by jealousy of John’s affection for her.”

  “Probably ... I feel so mean for saying all this behind her back. But I’ve been thinking of it a great deal, and for John’s sake I do feel something should be done, and promptly.”

  “Exactly my own view. Well, now we’ve had the diagnosis. What’s the cure to be? What treatment are you going to prescribe? What would you do with John if he were your child?”

  “I would do everything I could to help him to feel free and independent. I would encourage him to play by himself and invent games on his own. Lucia always seems to brood over him while he’s playing, making suggestions and helping him with things instead of letting him find the way out for himself. It’s time he learnt to stand more on his own feet. I wouldn’t warn him
about anything whatever unless it seemed absolutely necessary ... He’s grown persnickety about his food because he senses Lucia’s anxiety that he should eat well, and perpetually hearing about food values has put him off. At first I’d let him eat whatever he wanted whenever he liked, without making a to-do about it. I would take no notice if he missed a meal—he’d soon get back a natural appetite.” She paused.

  Hugh nodded. “Go on.”

  “He needs more confidence. I would ask him his opinion about things like the colour of a new dress, and whether I should put the roses in a glass vase or a china one. I’d ask him to take messages to the gardener and letters to the post and lists to the greengrocer—there’s no crossing on the way!—so that in time, instead of relying too much on me, he’d feel that I relied on him. And above all I’d try never to let my love oppress him.” Shyly she smiled at Hugh. “Well, there you have my views, for what they’re worth! They say in Scotland that ‘maiden’s bairns are aye weel guidit.’ I suppose it’s rather ridiculous for an old maid to lay down the law about how a child should be brought up, particularly to the child’s own father—and above all when he happens to be a doctor.”

  “If you should live to be a hundred and die unwed, you would never be an old maid,” Hugh said quietly. “As for John, I entirely agree with every word you’ve said. You’ve clarified my own ideas. The next thing is, how are we going to set about it? I’d been meaning to tell Lucia this evening that the time was ripe to hand John over to Jenny, but this measles business has put a stop to that. And Mrs. MacNeish is going to have enough on her hands without giving John even the minimum of attention that we agree he needs.”