“I believe so.”
She decided to test him. “So how do you feel about the woodland? Which option do you think you’d prefer?”
A gleam of understanding lit his face, as though he had read and appreciated her motives. “I think I’d prefer to have the largest possible area of woodland,” he said, with a show of great seriousness. “Either side of the glen and all the way down to the meadow and right along to the bridge. Complete with glades, as you suggest, and some coppicing to the north, to attract the birds. That was your second option, I believe, wasn’t it?” He didn’t pause to relish his moment of triumph. “And I’d prefer wholly indigenous trees, or how did you put it? trees that have been growing here for at least a thousand years. Almost indigenous. Like most of the Irish, you might say. And four species sounds plenty to me. Oak, elm, hazel and .. . yew, was it? Yes, I think that will look very fine. And if it’s fifty years to maturity well, I grudgingly accept the risk of not being around to see them in their full glory.”
She should have realised that, even with minimal concentration, he would have an effortless grasp of content and detail.
“Only one thing.. .” He lifted a hand and rotated it in a gesture of unexpected grace. “I don’t think I can resist one item from your list of exotic species. A handkerchief tree. The name appeals to me. The idea appeals to me. I believe I’ve seen a picture of one. Would that be allowed?”
If he was being facetious, he hid it well.
“It’s not a question of anything not being allowed,” she said. “You can have whatever tree you like, wherever you like, so long as the soil’s right. A handkerchief tree would probably be best on the edge of the lawn, in the rough grass, as a focal point.”
“In solitary splendour?”
“I would think so, yes.”
“When does it produce all those handkerchiefs?”
“May or thereabouts.”
“So ... I should hold back on all my tears till springtime, then.” He said it lightly, but not so lightly that there wasn’t a reflective ness in his tone, and it struck her that for all his money and success life hadn’t gone entirely his way.
She said, “This woodland .. . You do realise the size of the undertaking?”
He bowed his head again and smiled. “You’ve explained it very clearly.”
“It’ll take some time to cost it accurately, but if you want semi-mature trees we’re talking tens of thousands.”
He gave a considered shrug.
“You want to go ahead, then?”
“I believe so.”
“But why?” The instant the question was out, she wished it unsaid. She felt the heat come into her face.
He paused to make sure he had understood her. “You mean, why bother?”
“I meant... I didn’t realise you had such a feeling for trees.”
This explanation didn’t fool him for a moment, but he answered it all the same, albeit wryly. “Ireland has so little woodland, does it not? It’s a small investment for the future. A gesture if you like. We’ll all be moving on soon enough, won’t we, but the trees, they’ll still be here. My small piece of immortality.” He smiled broadly to show he didn’t really take thoughts of immortality too seriously. “Not much else one can leave behind. Besides, I was always sad that the old woods went.”
He was talking about the oak wood that had been felled before she was born in what must have been one of her father’s first acts on marrying into the family and taking over the house. While she was growing up, this event had never been mentioned at Morne, except by unwitting neighbours, who’d soon found it a poor subject for conversation. She supposed it had been done for the money.
“You might say the woods here gave me some of my happiest memories,” Terry said. She’d forgotten his smile, the way it lifted one side of his mouth before spreading up into his eyes.
“The poaching, you mean?”
He drew in a soft breath of mock offence. “Vermin control.”
“Ah.” She began to fold up the plans. “Done from the goodness of your heart, then?”
“The pigeon were terrible. The rabbits worse.”
“And that was it, was it?”
Pretending seriousness, he made a show of searching his memory. “I believe so.”
“Mummy said you used to take the brown trout.”
“I might have glimpsed them in passing, but they were too quick for me,” he said ruefully. “Never could master the tickle.”
“She said you used nets.”
“No, no, that was Paddy O’Brien!” he said firmly. “He was a devil for the nets and the explosives. Your mamma always had that wrong,” he said fondly. “For all the years I knew her, she had that wrong.”
Rather briskly, Catherine put the visuals back in their folder.
Taking his cue, Terry straightened up and placed both hands flat on the table. “The garden,” he said, ‘would you want to have a look around straight away or after lunch?”
She chose to go straight away. This contingency, like everything else, had been planned for. A golf buggy had appeared at the front of the house, as if by magic.
“Is this yours?” she asked disapprovingly, hating the thought that he had bought it specially.
“I borrowed it from a golf club over by Carlow,” he said immediately. “The alternative was the quad, but I wasn’t sure if it was your sort of thing.”
He was right, she couldn’t have ridden pillion, not without her arms locked precariously around the driver’s waist. At the same time, she viewed the buggy with resentment because it was everything that was safe and dull. “A quad is just my sort of thing actually,” she declared childishly. “But not very practical when I’m working and taking notes.”
Pat lifted her out of her chair into the buggy and wrapped a rug around her legs against a gathering wind. She thought again: The detail, the detail. And wondered yet again why Terry should go to all this trouble, what he could possibly want from her. In the next instant she persuaded herself that it really didn’t matter. When the fee was large and you needed the money, explanations were something of a luxury.
“We’ve had a go at the worst of it,” Terry said cryptically as they set off around the side of the house onto the grass. “Tidied things up a bit.”
“From what you described, it sounded like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.”
“Ah, but we fought the worst of the brambles off the house. We hacked them back.”
As they emerged onto the lawn she saw beds with only a mild sprinkling of weeds and hedges with the barest stubble of new growth. “Looks fine,” she commented.
“Wait till you see the shrubbery,” Terry said, rolling his eyes in mock despair.
The machete?”
“Believe me, that would have been merciful.”
“And you’ve managed to restrain him since, your gardener?”
“We’ve had him chained hand and foot, worse than a felon.”
Led by the dog, zigzagging rapidly ahead, the buggy trundled across the lawn to the long walk, where she saw real work to be done on the avenue of yews, deadwood to be cut out, and tops to be tapered to let the light down. At the far end of the walk, framed by the long promenade of yews, was the ancient arbour encased in a tangle of rose stems, also in need of pruning, and when they reached the opening half way along the avenue, she saw that the wrought-iron gate was badly overgrown. Making the calculations that came automatically to her, she reckoned it would take a good gardener seven or eight weeks to get the remedial work done, and that was before any preparation for spring planting.
At the arbour, Terry turned the buggy onto the narrow grass path that led into the area of scrub known as the wilderness, and stopped. Before them, the ground sloped away through coarse grass and bracken, rowan and young hazel to the lip of the small gorge, which sheltered, deep in its cleft, the concealed stream. Further down the glen was the bridge, also hidden from this point, and visible on the far side, the wild-flower meadow
with its autumn cover, a sea of tall silvery grasses that rippled and shivered in the wind.
“It will be a derry,” Terry announced as he surveyed the wilderness. “I think I’m right in saying that means oak grove in old Irish, aren’t I? When you think of all the smaller places, the crofts and the like, which are called something-or-another-derry you realise what the country must have looked like in the olden times.”
She was aware of him gazing at her again. “So .. .” he murmured softly, as though passing from one thought to another.
She glanced at him expectantly, and was surprised to see him drop his eyes in what in any other man could have been a momentary shyness.
He indicated the wilderness. “Will it be possible to grow wild flowers under the trees?” he asked, like a diligent pupil.
“While the trees are young, you’ll be able to grow them almost everywhere. Later, well .. . there’re one or two species that tolerate shade. But in the glades that’ll be the wonderful thing about the glades, walking out of the trees into a sea of wild flowers.”
When she looked back at him he seemed distracted.
“Thank you again for sending the wild flowers,” she said, wanting to get this out of the way. “They were .. .” She hesitated and settled on, ‘different’.
“They probably didn’t keep too long.”
“No, but that didn’t matter.”
“You didn’t mind then, that I sent them?”
“Mind? No. No, I... they were lovely.”
He seemed relieved. “I’d wondered maybe .. .” But with a sudden smile he left this thought aside and said brightly, “Now, tell me something, Catherine if it were up to you, how would you choose to do this garden? Here in the wilderness, for example, would you make a woodland of it?”
“I couldn’t say. It’s not my garden. That’s the whole point -it’s an individual thing.”
“But it used to be your garden.”
“Never mine,” she protested. “My family’s. My mother’s.”
“All right,” he conceded easily. “So if it were yours now, at this moment, what would you do with it?”
“You’re asking the impossible ... It all depends on how one feels about a place, how one sees it. I don’t live here any more, I couldn’t have a view on that.”
He made a face of disappointment. “So I can’t have the benefit of your opinion?”
“You told me what you were looking for in a garden. I must go by that.”
He searched his memory. “What did I say exactly?”
“You said .. . natural, tranquil, wooded.”
“Ah. I might have been concocting a thing or two there,” he said in the manner of the confessional. “I don’t think I really knew what I wanted. In truth, I’m still not too sure. Most of the time, I don’t feel like a proprietor at all, you see. More like a caretaker who happened along.”
Her anger caught her unawares. “We’re all caretakers, aren’t we?”
Shuddering inwardly at the banality, she added, “But you got the place.
You acquired it.”
“Well... I ended up with it at any rate.”
“Ended up with it? You sound as though you didn’t want it!” she retorted. Before he could answer she said with a pretence of indifference, “But that’s none of my business. And nothing to do with the garden. Which is what we’re here to discuss, isn’t it?”
There was a taut pause.
Terry said in a low voice, “I think lunch will be ready and waiting. If you need to see anything else, perhaps we might do it later.”
He reversed the buggy back onto the main walk, and they returned to the house in a silence that she might have broken if she could have thought of anything pleasant to say.
The house was warm, the trestle table had been laid for two. Catherine could hear Bridget and another woman in the kitchen, chattering softly. Terry brought in soup and warm bread, and some wine. It was good wine, and Catherine decided she’d have at least two glasses, which was one more than the doctor had deemed healthy for her kidneys, or it might have been her liver, it suited her to forget which.
The skirmish still turning in her mind, Catherine maintained a deliberate coolness as they began to eat, but if Terry noticed or minded he gave no sign. He talked companionably about the latest neighbourhood gossip, the scandals and mishaps, ‘though I’ve only half an ear to what’s really going on.”
She’d forgotten quite how easy and unassuming his manner was, how his blend of banter and attentiveness made you feel you were the one person in the world he wanted to talk to. She’d forgotten how effectively he used this approach to draw you into a sense of friendship and intimacy, and how easy it was to believe in it. There had been a time in the long summer of her mother’s illness when she’d been beguiled by this, when she’d come to look forward to their walks and their rambling absurd intense conversations, had even it made her shudder now begun to think of him with great fondness. But thank God she had found him out in time.
She accepted a third glass of wine even before he brought the main course.
“It was good to see Maeve at the unit that day,” she said. “But you were there too. You should have come in and said hello.”
“I thought best not,” he said pleasantly. “I thought one of us was probably enough.”
“How’s she enjoying the nursery nursing? The new college?”
“A success, it seems.”
“And her health?”
“Oh, stronger, you know. Better by the day.”
“She was very ill, she said.”
“She nearly died.”
“Septicaemia.”
Lowering his fork, he said sharply, “It was the incompetence of the doctors.”
“They didn’t spot it in time?”
“Too busy banking their fees. I’d like to sue them to kingdom come, I’d like to see every last one of them struck off.” The quietness of his voice did not disguise the enmity beneath, and it seemed to Catherine that this gave the lie to the quiet charm that had gone before, that here at last was the vengeful man who did not take kindly to being thwarted. Then, as if to turn this impression on its head, he gave a long and heartfelt sigh. “I’d do it if I believed for a moment that it could make up for the suffering Maeve has been through. But sometimes at the end of the day it’s wiser to think about your future, your health, and whether you want something like that hanging over you, poisoning your life, for years and years to come. If you can’t forgive, you can at least try to forget and put it behind you. This is Maeve’s view. And it is mine.” He looked at her in a strange way, as though he wanted to say more, before changing the subject abruptly. “But now, what about you, Catherine? How are you getting on?”
“Me?” She was immediately on her guard. “Oh, well enough. I can’t run like I used to, of course.”
Far from being embarrassed, he seemed to understand her need for bad jokes. “But you’re managing all right?”
“Oh yes.”
“It must be a matter of the practicalities, of a hundred small annoyances.”
“I’ve never tried counting them, but yes, the annoyances. And other people.”
He grasped her meaning immediately. “Ah, they try too hard, do they?
Kind to a fault?”
“They gush. They talk as though I were a child. That, or they look above me, past me, through me. I become invisible.”
“It could have advantages, being invisible .. . But perhaps not that many.”
“Not that many.”
“But you have your family, your friends.”
She said evasively, “I have all I need.”
“And the house, it’s been adapted? You’re managing there?”
This answered the question that had been on her mind for some days:
whether Terry knew she was living in the flat, whether Maeve had kept her promise of secrecy. “The house ... is not ideal,” she admitted. She hadn’t intended to tell him about the diffi
culties of living in a two-storey house without a stairlift but he was a patient and attentive listener, and perhaps she’d got to the stage where she needed to tell somebody, but she found herself going through it at some length, finishing on a note of exasperation. In case this had given away too much, she added, “Of course, we’d have put in a st airlift if we were sure about keeping the house. But we’re still thinking about moving. We haven’t made up our minds yet.”
“But what happens when Ben’s away you’re not on your own there, are you?”
She stiffened. “Occasionally.”
A long pause in which he fiddled with a spoon and seemed noticeably ill at ease. Several times he seemed on the point of speaking before he finally asked, “And the trial of this man?”
“It starts next week.”
“Are you going to have to appear yourself?”
“No.”
“But still a strain, I imagine.”
“Only if I let it be.”
“You have plenty of support?”
He had asked it with such open concern that she answered this too.
“Yes. The police are very good.”
“Support’s very important,” he muttered vaguely.
Another silence during which Terry laced and unlaced his fingers several times. “Ben’s still in partnership with Mr. Jardine, is he?” he asked eventually.
She queried the subject with a frown.
“I was just curious,” he said.
“Actually, no,” she answered cautiously. “Simon decided to go his own way.”
“I see. Since when?”
“Oh, quite recently.”
“Ah. But it was a mutual thing, was it?”
“Completely.”
And with that, the strange stilted questions came to an end.
There was a pudding, but she couldn’t eat it. There was more wine, which she could manage very well. Over coffee, he asked about her work, but aware that the wine was in danger of making her garrulous she got him to talk about his work instead.
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