Hardacre's Luck (The Hardacre Family Saga Book 2)

by CL Skelton

  Sam turned to Jan whose face had a dreamy look as of one wakened from sleep. He again made that short, characteristic shake of his head, as if clearing his thoughts and said simply, ‘I am so sorry. It was unforgivable. I do not know what I can say.’

  Sam shrugged.

  ‘I suppose he gave you reason.’

  But Jan replied tiredly, ‘He is filth. But it was no reason. I am sorry. I forget at times where I am, who I am. So much, learned so hard; so hard to unlearn.’ He shrugged also, and Sam, who had had his own war, thought he understood. Jan looked about the shattered room, seeking someone to whom he might direct his regrets. There was no one; only a circle of confused guests before him and Janet Chandler, yet unseen, behind him in the doorway. So, facing Harry Hardacre, who throughout had stood straight-backed and unshaken by the chaos, he said, ‘My behaviour was unforgivable. I extend my heartfelt apologies. I will leave you now.’ Then he bowed, a short formal bow from the waist, and turned and walked out of the room.

  In his dazed state he did not notice Janet Chandler standing just inside the door. She turned, her eyes following his back, and when she looked back into the room, it was Sam that she first saw. What intimacy had occurred between them, momentarily, in her bedroom was forgotten. She looked straightforwardly into his eyes, as if he were a useful stranger.

  ‘Who is that man?’ she said, softly awed.

  Sam didn’t stay around to explain. His duties, he felt, were towards Jan, who he had got into this mess, and he hastened after him. His farewell to Janet Chandler was brief. He fully expected to see her the next day, when she and all the family were to tour the Festival site on the South Bank, pose for pictures and share a publicity-minded luncheon in one of the pretty temporary summer cafes. Besides, her dismissal of him, so soon after her unexpected momentary intimacy, shook him. He felt he was no longer talking to the same person and he felt, too, with faint resentment, that the reason was Jan.

  No matter, he would sort that out tomorrow. But the tomorrow he had planned did not arrive. After escorting Jan Muller, moody and depressed after the violence of the evening, back to Earls Court, he slipped out to a phone box and made his call to Mick Raddley that he had never made from Claridges.

  ‘Where t’ hell have you been?’ Mick growled, over a crackly line.

  ‘Detained,’ Sam said, shortly, not in the best of temper.

  ‘Well, happen ye’d better get un-detained,’ said Mick. ‘Big nor’easter’s blown up an’ broke t’mooring lines on that barge we anchored overt’ work site. Run her ashore.’

  ‘The equipment?’ Sam demanded, quickly tallying the load of the barge, which they had been using to attempt to raise the propeller of their wartime wreck.

  ‘Pete an’ I got most of it off, before, on to t’ Dainty Girl. But the barge’ll break up if’n we don’t get her off. We’re going out at first light if the wind drops.’ He paused. ‘Could use some help,’ he said pointedly, and Sam could hear the familiar chomp of his yellowed teeth on his pipe-stem.

  ‘I’ll get the next train,’ he said. ‘And Jan, too,’ he added, for reasons of his own.

  And so, by one o’clock in the afternoon, while Janet Chandler, in a Festival of Britain jumper decorated with a futuristic Britannia, one small hand holding down her loose blonde hair, posed before the Skylon for the cameras of the world, Sam Hardacre was knee-deep in surf on a wind-battered North Sea shore, fixing salvage lines on a recalcitrant barge. The following day he saw Janet’s picture in every newspaper, a stranger from another world.

  He would not see her again for four long, active years and, before he did, his own life would have been irrevocably changed for ever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Everyone agreed the gardens of Hardacres were at their best in May, though March ran a close second, when the daffodils scattered chaotically across the wide lawns, and gathered in yellow herds in the marshy greenery down where the beech wood faded to lawn, by the Victorian marble tomb old Sam had built there for himself.

  Sam was not its first occupant, however. Harry’s youthful bride, Judith Winstanley, mother of his two children had been laid there first, a week after the birth of her daughter. Sam was second; Mary Hardacre third. And fourth was Hetty, in the early summer of 1953. She had come half a century before to Hardacres, as nursemaid to Harry’s motherless children. And though she had spent the rest of her life there, first as nanny, and then as wife, she had never really taken possession of any of it. The children she raised there were not her own, her husband’s affections forever only half hers. Once she shared him with a ghost; later with his mistress. The house itself eluded her, as if it, too, were living and faithless. She walked its corridors for fifty years, always with the hesitant tread of one who came first as a servant. Even on the day of her death, her requests and desires were couched in trembling uncertainty. So that when, upon retiring for her regular afternoon rest, she had asked Mrs Bennett for a cup of tea to be sent to her room, she had done so so diffidently that the request, like all Hetty’s hesitant desires was, if not ignored, simply postponed throughout the afternoon until, when the tray finally reached her bedside, Hetty herself had gone. Harry was summoned, and found his wife quietly dead with her small hands clutching the edge of the coverlet as if about to draw across her lined face her own shroud. She had left them, as she had come to them, creeping like a small brown mouse into eternity.

  But if Hardacres had been less than attentive throughout her life it, like a guilty spouse, made up for it at Hetty Hardacre’s funeral. Harry himself thought he had never seen the old place quite so beautiful, brightly rain-washed under a blue flirtatious sky, filled with grey cumulous clouds rolling down from the moor, and respectfully piling up only in the northern sky, beyond the big red house, so that the sun might still shine on Hetty’s burial.

  Hardacre roses covered her coffin, and Hardacre family, gathered from diverse and distant locales, followed her to the church and back to the family tomb beneath the beeches. It was the largest gathering of the family since young Sam’s party over two years ago celebrating the launching of Hardacre Salvage. Ironically, he was the only member of the immediate family who did not attend; urgent business kept him elsewhere. Although he sent his telegrammed regrets and spoke at length with his bereaved uncle over a difficult line from the northwest coast of Scotland, his mother Madelene found his absence unforgivable. She had determined to tell him so, too, though Harry advised her gently not to do so. He was aware, as was she, that their influence on young Sam was lessened to the point of non-existence. Sometimes she felt painfully that she meant nothing at all to him, any longer. Terry, who alone of all the family seemed yet to truly communicate with Sam, insisted it was not so. But then Terry would defend his brother at any cost.

  What made it all the more painful for Madelene was that in spite of the same business pressures that Sam had pleaded, Jan Muller had attended. And so, of course, had Erasmus Sykes, but that was less surprising since, while Jan Muller’s mourning could hardly be more than good manners, Erasmus Sykes’s grief was all too real.

  Their friendship, begun so quixotically at that same party two years before, had blossomed into one of life’s more unlikely liaisons. Erasmus Sykes had become a regular visitor at Hardacres, spending long Sunday afternoons in winter with Hetty before the drawing-room fire, or strolling in the summer gardens, with the lady of the house on his arm. It was really quite apparent to everyone that Erasmus had simply fallen in love with Harry Hardacre’s modest and retiring wife. But so respectful, indeed worshipful, was his attitude, so caring for every courtesy and decency, so comically innocent in a man of near sixty years, that no one, least of all Harry, could dream of objecting. Far from it; Harry was intensely grateful for the bright, gentle pleasure Erasmus had brought to Hetty’s final years. Of course, it was only in retrospect that the finality of those years was apparent although, also in retrospect, the signs were subtly there, as general invalidity turned almost suddenly to something more thr
eatening, to whispered conversations with doctors, and inconclusive tests, and decisions not to operate, decisions also not to tell the patient of her plight. It was that deception, not the more obvious romantic deception of his long years with Madelene, that Harry regretted most after her death, since its secrecy had separated them in a way Madelene’s love had never done. Once he had thought to confide in Erasmus, but decided against it, knowing he would only be easing his mind at the expense of that of Hetty’s friend. He left them to their late-November romance, like two schoolchildren holding hands down some long-gone autumn lane. They had had such fun together, drawing from each other secret untapped resources, drawing each other out of their cavernous silent shells. It was Erasmus who had persuaded Hetty to take over the directing of the local village pageant, in that same Festival year of 1951 in which young Sam’s salvage business first got properly under way. Hetty had stunned everyone with her emergence from her shyness and a quite remarkable theatrical talent. The pageant had featured historical figures from Britain’s past and Erasmus, coy as a prima donna, had been coaxed into the role of Henry VIII, complete with black poodles. It was probably the highlight of his entire lonely life.

  Hetty had done that, Harry reflected now, carefully dead-heading the tea roses in his mother’s favourite rose bed. Quiet little Hetty. His respect for her, always latent, suddenly emerged and grew to tremendous proportions, now that she was gone. He supposed it to be a form of guilt, for guilt was what he had expected, guilt, lying in wait for him, was what he had braced for and, surprisingly, guilt, in open guise, had not yet come.

  As if to test that premise, the sound, throaty and evocative, of a sports car engine purred up into Harry’s consciousness, and he straightened his stiffening back and gazed down the long, curving pink drive. The sound grew and faded, a tremolo born of the twisting of the roadway and sudden copses of trees that blocked sound intermittently all the way up from the Driffield road. But then he caught a flash of red between two grey beech trunks and smiled in spite of himself. Perhaps he was simply too old to indulge in hypocrisy; Madelene had delighted him for over thirty years. She would not cease to delight him now that Hetty was dead.

  She parked the car part-way down the drive, by the flowering cherry that Mary Hardacre had planted and which was now growing old and lichen-bound. She paused a moment before opening the door, and then stepped out almost hesitantly. He wanted to call out, to ease her way with words, but knew she must find her own pace back to him, and redetermine for herself her welcome. He stood among his roses, secateurs in hand, as she slowly, with dignity, approached. He thought of her suddenly as his bride, at last, coming to his home, and in the same instant tried to fathom by what method she had, over the years, justified their adultery in the lights of her faith to which she was so undoubtedly devoted. She was French; therein he knew lay the answer. Hers was a peasant faith, and the lady before him, for all the sophistication of her pearl-grey sheath dress, had had a peasant childhood in provincial France. From such childhoods comes the all-forgiving faith with which she was blessed. He wished suddenly his own youth had provided him with an equivalent malleable code that could absorb guilt so gently and reassure so heartily. Both his parents had been religious, in that they believed in God. But theirs was an odd God, wrapped up somehow with class and social status and propriety so that, although they wed in church, they did not return there, except for the christenings of their children, until Sam Hardacre’s business success had borne them into a higher social strata, in which apparently they felt themselves more able to approach the Lord. It was almost as if they felt they must improve themselves in this world before they were fit to approach the next. And yet no doubt they had believed, and they had faced their own deaths with equanimity.

  As for himself; Oxford, the Boer War, Judith Winstanley and his bitter loss of her; all had unravelled whatever fragile fabric of religion they had bequeathed him. He was not an atheist, nor even an agnostic, but a gentle humanist who tried to live according to a private code of decency that had more to do with the philosophies of his favourite poet and his own deep-rooted desire to preserve what remained, in a changing world, of grace and beauty, than with God. Perhaps, he thought bemusedly, that was what God was to him. Just as the animist found his Lord in trees and water, so Harry Hardacre found him in the slow heritage of two thousand years of civilization, and art.

  ‘Harry?’ Madelene called, still many yards away across the green lawn.

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  ‘Do you wish to be alone?’

  He smiled. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Shall we have tea then?’

  ‘Why not?’ With his arm lightly on her shoulder, as much for his own balance with his bad leg gone stiff from his gardening, as for her comfort, they made their way up the wide sweep of steps to the semi-circle of gravel, and the front door of Hardacres.

  Harry laid his secateurs on the inlaid Indian coffee table before the fire, and rang the bell for Mrs Bennett. His eyes met Madelene’s, and there passed between them a look of both affection and apprehension. They might as well start now, Harry thought, though Madelene’s dark eyes were filled with unease and vulnerability. Throughout their years together, she had been the object of a great deal of below-stairs fascination and gossip, but the existence of a valid wife above stairs had kept all such speculation firmly in its place. Now all was changed, and what little remained of their staff, coupled with the much larger field of village observers, would be waiting, perhaps with no little belated aggression for the next moves by the rival of their dead mistress. Hetty, gently forgiving, silently unseeing, had protected them. She would protect them no longer.

  Mrs Bennett appeared. Her eyes darted from Harry to Madelene and then back firmly to Harry, refusing again to acknowledge Madelene’s presence. ‘Sir,’ she said, shortly.

  ‘Tea, please, Mrs Bennett.’

  ‘For two?’ she asked perversely, and Harry nodded patiently, ‘For two.’

  ‘Very good sir.’

  She left them, closing the door behind her with a firm, pointed little clunk. Harry almost laughed. Outraged Yorkshire decency had managed at last to produce what years of gentle training had not. Mrs Bennett had finally achieved the brisk formality of properly schooled staff; losing, through disapproval, the too cosy country style that had long been her major failing.

  ‘She detests me,’ said Madelene forlornly. ‘And she always will.’

  ‘She’s embarrassed,’ Harry said gently, ‘She doesn’t know what to think. She doesn’t know what we are going to do. Give her time. She’ll come around.’ He paused then, having touched a crucial issue, before he was really ready to face it. But having raised it, he felt he must pursue it. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.

  She shrugged, Gallic and unfettered. ‘Does it matter?’ she said.

  ‘Of course it matters,’ said Harry. She shrugged again. He paused, feeling this was neither the time nor the place, and resenting being forced to hurry a moment he had long savoured in advance because of the gossipy Mrs Bennett. But he said, ‘Do you want to marry me?’ She shrugged again, darting him a quick, uncertain, indeed almost hostile glance.

  ‘I can’t marry you,’ she said at last.

  ‘Can’t?’ he said, blinking, wondering in a totally insane way if she had momentarily forgotten that at last they were both free.

  ‘Of course not. You’re not a Catholic.’

  Harry stared. He was not sure she was not simply joking. It wasn’t always easy to tell with Madelene.

  ‘I’m not a Catholic,’ he repeated slowly, as if uncertain of having heard her correctly.

  ‘No,’ she said briskly, ‘and you won’t convert because you hate the Church. So I can’t marry you.’

  ‘I don’t hate the Church,’ Harry protested loudly. He was about to add, also loudly, that it was Hetty who hated the Church, in case she’d forgotten, but decided not to drag Hetty’s name into any of this. Besides, Mrs Bennett’s steps were sound
ing in the corridor and he did not wish to satisfy her morbid curiosity with a lovers’ tiff. They both fell silent at the knock on the door and Harry bade Mrs Bennett enter. In silence they watched as she set down the tray and adjusted the cups in readiness. Pointedly, she placed the handle of the silver teapot directly in front of Harry, no longer allowing Madelene that mistress’s right she had so often been permitted before. ‘That will be all, Mrs Bennett,’ Harry said, tired of the pointed fussing, and Mrs Bennett, surprised by the unaccustomed harshness of tone, made a hasty, graceless exit.

  ‘Silly cow,’ said Madelene, anger reviving her old spirit.

  ‘I don’t hate the Church,’ Harry repeated, as if the interruption had not occurred. ‘If, as you say, I won’t convert, it has nothing to do with hating the Church. I respect the Church, Madelene. Really I do. I sometimes feel quite envious, I mean, talking to Terry particularly.’

  ‘But you won’t convert.’

  ‘How can I, Madelene?’ he pleaded simply. ‘I don’t believe.’

  She shrugged again, reaching deliberately in front of him to turn the teapot and undo Mrs Bennett’s sabotage. She started to pour tea.

  ‘I can’t marry a non-Catholic.’

  He shook his head, bewildered, and said suddenly with a dignity comically opposed to his words, ‘It’s hardly stopped you going to bed with one all these years. And a married one.’

  ‘That’s different,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a sin, damn it,’ he argued, ‘your Church says so.’

  ‘Only God knows what is a sin and what isn’t,’ she returned, stubbornly.

  ‘But if you married me,’ Harry pursued, ‘it would stop being a sin. All these years you’ve been sinning, and now you’ve got the chance to make it all legal you’re refusing. The Church does allow such marriages. I’ll talk to Terry. Surely there is some way …’