by CL Skelton
Harry’s walk had been shorter than the old walk he once had taken regularly, down through the steading, across the bottom field, out along the border of the two pastures, as far as the edge of the moorland, and then back by a circuitous route to the beech wood, and home. These days he wandered as far as the summer-house, the over-grown fishpond, the edge of the rhododendrons and through the subtle brown light of the beeches to the small cottage, now empty, where his mother had spent the final years of her life, having forsaken the big house when her husband died. It was not a sentimental journey on Harry’s part. She had been an old woman when she died, and he was an old man. He was no longer sentimental about death. It had become a familiar. Indeed, his journey was shortened, just as the shadows of the beech wood were lengthened, merely by time. He walked always with a stick now, and this small circumference of his land was all he could manage. It was, also, all he cared to manage. His world was closing in, with the closing shadows, to the fireside. As he approached the house, wondering why Mrs Bennett had lit the fire so early, he thought suddenly of the firesides of his childhood, camp-fires beside the itinerant pony cart, and kitchen-range fires in the rented rooms that were his parents’ many homes. They would do him now, he thought. As one grew older the scope of the space one felt capable of occupying grew smaller. In the end, the deathroom and the nursery were one.
He saw, as he cleared the last of the rhododendrons, a large, work-used-looking lorry parked before the house, and quickened his limping steps gladly. Sam was home. Hence the fire, and the smoke from his library chimney. Harry was as pleased as a child, as the child he had once been on his own father’s return. He glanced at the lorry as he passed. Sam always arrived in something like that, ungainly and businesslike, and he suspected he did not own a proper car. Or if he did, he rarely used it. Harry wondered if that was his way of making amends to Terry; by making driving, which he had loved, a matter of business that he must do, forbidding himself the pleasure it once gave him. He was sorry. There was no making amends. One simply had to get on with life, but that was something only Sam himself could learn, in whatever time it took him to learn it.
He had seen a lot more of his great-nephew in the last few weeks, indeed he had practically taken to living at Hardacres once more. Harry was glad, but guiltily so, sensing the reasons were not happy ones. Still, Sam kept them to himself, and he no longer displayed the high tempers and childish moodiness that he did in the old days, with Janet. Harry knew from that alone that this time the split, if that’s what it was, was real.
Harry was glad to get inside. The house was warm. Sam had put central heating in some years ago, and a big tanker with oil regularly arrived and kept it stocked. Harry never saw the bills, which was just as well, since he no doubt could not have paid them. He appreciated that more than anything. As one got older, cold became one’s enemy, as if the grave was teasing already. In fact the whole place was looking better than it had in years. There was an extra woman from the village helping out, and many of the rooms had been redecorated. Of course, there was always more to be done, always carpets that grew tatty, furniture that sagged. It was like painting the Forth Bridge, keeping a place like Hardacres going; it was so impossibly big. ‘What can Father have been thinking of?’ Harry asked himself, not for the first time. But of course, in those days there was money, and staff worked for a pittance and, in the brutal 1880s, were glad of it.
Harry met Mrs Bennett in the hall. Over the years she had softened to him again, and finally even to Madelene, and indeed was known now loyally to defend in village gossip her new mistress’s unorthodox arrangements with the master of the house. All things took time, Harry knew, and only time. ‘Young Mr Hardacre is in the library,’ she said. ‘Shall I bring tea?’ Harry nodded, making his limping way across the hall, his stick careful on the polished floor. He wondered what had become of the Boer farmer-soldier who’d given him the wound in his leg half a century before that had so plagued him ever since. Probably dead. Most of his generation were.
Harry pushed open the library door, feeling guiltily glad that Madelene was away at the dress shop. She had continued with her proprietorship of that establishment even after joining Harry at Hardacres, as his wife in all but name, and he had encouraged her. She was young yet, at least in his eyes, and she needed to be out and about and, though he was a little lonely now in the daytime in the big empty house without her, he would not have wanted her tied to his side. Their relationship had grown chaste and honourable, by force of the years, and he was grateful to her loyalty, and sometimes wondered at it. Still, he preferred her to be absent when Sam came to see him. She was hard on Sam, and the atmosphere was always charged with tension when the two of them were together. She seemed always to think he did not do enough in terms of family, whereas Harry thought he did too much. It was the difference that blood parenthood made; she regarded his attentions to them as a right, and Harry saw them as a gift. She was demanding of her son, and he, who was not the father, was forgiving. Madelene, he knew, felt she owed him a debt for his part in raising both her boys, and she would have Sam pay it. Harry thought nothing of the kind, and sometimes secretly suspected Madelene was punishing one son for the loss of the other, something for which, had he proof, he would have castigated her. But it was a thing made of subtleties, impossible to prove. Ironically, it was at times like this, in the companionship they shared when she was absent that any debts there might have been were paid.
Sam was sprawled comfortably across the floor in front of the big wood fire, surrounded by stacks of leather-bound ancient books. He was wearing dungarees and a fisherman’s jersey, and had obviously come straight from work.
He got up as Harry entered, and stood, respectfully, as he said, ‘I’ve rather helped myself,’ indicating the books and the fire. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Of course not,’ Harry said, waving him back to his place by the fire. ‘How very good to see you. I’ve asked Mrs Bennett for tea. You will stay, won’t you?’ he added. He’d not yet got used to the change from the old flying visits of the last year. He wanted to ask about Janet and knew he’d better not. He said instead, indicating the books, ‘Looking for something particular?’ Nothing suited Harry better than a chance to sleuth through his extensive library in search of information that only he was likely to find.
‘Yes, I am, actually,’ Sam said, slowly turning the fragile pages of a bound collection of Parish annals. ‘I’m looking for a ship.’
‘In there?’ Harry said, settling down on the sofa with his bad leg held out straight before him.
Sam said, ‘Your leg worse?’
‘Winter,’ said Harry.
‘It’s October,’ Sam answered softly.
‘When you’re my age, you’ll find winter begins in October.’ Harry shrugged. ‘Tell me about your ship.’
‘Do you want the doctor to see you?’ Sam said.
‘When he’s found a cure for old age,’ Harry said, ‘I’d be delighted. Stop tha fussin’.’ Sam look startled, and faintly apprehensive. His great-uncle’s childhood dialect had taken to creeping back into his speech as the past slowly advanced against the present in his mind.
‘All right,’ he said slowly, forcing his own mind back to the ship and off Harry’s health, which worried him more and more. Harry had become to him an old man the year that Terry was killed. He was not sure if any real change had taken place or whether his own vision of life was utterly altered on that day. In the aftermath he had hardly noticed; when time allowed him to look more fully on other people he saw Harry suddenly aged beyond recognition. Harry had never recovered from that year, but remained ever afterwards sadly mellowed and resigned.
Sam said quietly, ‘She was three-masted and a collier, there’s still coal in the wreck. We found her out on the Smethwick, almost completely buried in sand.’
‘We?’
‘One of the divers and I. We’ve got some of this new scuba gear and we’ve been trying it out. It’s quit
e fantastic.’
‘You’re doing that?’ Harry said.
‘Just for fun. The old wreck’s not worth anything, of course, and coal’s easier to get from the coalman, but she’s interesting.’
‘It’s dangerous, surely.’
‘No, it’s not, Harry,’ Sam said with a smile, ‘I promise you.’ He never told Harry about the things he did that were dangerous, only the things that were not. ‘But I’d like to find out which she was. We found what looks like copper letters, along part of her bow. Says Ann something, we think. I thought she’d maybe be mentioned. I have a feeling she’s one that went down in the Great Gale.’
‘Of 1871?’ said Harry.
‘That’s right.’
‘I remember the old wrecks on the shore. I used to play in them when I was a child.’
Sam looked up, startled, over the rims of his glasses. ‘Surely not.’
‘Of course. It was just a bit before I was born.’
‘Good God,’ Sam said.
Harry laughed. ‘Aye, lad,’ he said, amused. ‘I’m really that old. And what’s more, I bet I’m in better shape than your wreck, any road.’
‘Much better, Uncle Harry, much better.’ Sam rose and opened the door for Mrs Bennett who brought in tea on the silver tray. Unconsciously she treated him as the master of the house, as much as she treated Harry that way. Noel, ironically, who would one day, perhaps soon, really be master of Hardacres, she treated like a farm labourer.
They sat together drinking tea, and Harry from time to time remembered things, problems, about the house, over which he had meant to consult Sam. He saved them up, a little litany of troubles, mostly minor, occasionally major and to do with money, which latter he always approached with apologetic tentativeness for all Sam’s reassurance. He had come to rely totally on Sam’s judgement and his advice, and turned in every detail, like a child, to this man who, but a blink of his eye before, had been an unruly boy subject to his own rueful guidance. Now, whatever problem arose, he would say to Madelene, with contented trustfulness, ‘Sam will sort that. Sam will know what to do,’ and day by day he relinquished adulthood like a burden he was grateful not to have any longer.
Sam rose and went to the tall windows, looking out over the lawn. He leaned against them, his arms folded comfortably against the centre span of the sash, which made Harry suddenly realize how tall he was. He’d taken off his heavy jumper in the warmth of the room and was wearing only a light shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, in that way the young had of being warm all the time, when Harry was always cold. He stood a long time, watching something out of the window, and Harry studied him. His forearms were tanned and muscular, and Harry saw him suddenly as a big, powerful man, and was surprised. The image reminded him of someone, and he looked harder. Sam’s hair was lightened now, from the intense black it had once been, by a scattering of grey. The lightness of the hair was what did it, he realized, completing the resemblance.
‘Eh, lad.’
Sam half-turned.
‘You’re getting so like my father,’ Harry said.
Sam grinned, pleased. He beckoned Harry to the window and Harry hobbled across. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing out across the lawn where a gap in the line of tall elms showed an expanse of green down to the summer-house, the pond, and the beeches ruddy with autumn. The small herd of fallow deer, inhabitants of that cathedral woodland, had crept to the very edge of their domain and stood now, on the edge of darkness, peering out into the brightness of the lawns to the big house beyond. They were pale and delicate, and unearthly beautiful. Harry stood beside Sam in silence, watching for a long while. He said, slowly, quoting,
‘The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry …’
Sam smiled, and answered softly,
‘Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky …’
Harry stood quite still, holding the moment out there on the lawns and the moment in here in the library, together. Then suddenly there was a distant flutter of motion among the deer, and their heads came around as one as Noel, on his tractor, appeared at the edge of the vision. In an instant they broke, scattered, and were gone. The tractor rumbled across the edge of the lower pasture, ploughshares raised, black against the bright light.
‘Damn him,’ said Harry with a short, sharp intake of breath. He turned, shaking his head in sudden, old-age frustration.
Sam said gently, ‘He has to plough, Harry. It must be done.’
But Harry would not answer, because it was neither the deer nor the ploughing that really angered him, and there was no way he could explain. How could he put, to the one who was not his son, the myriad failings of the one who was? He shook his head and limped away from the window, his anger cooling. Why waste what he had, lamenting what he had not? His relationship with Noel had gone wrong the day the boy’s mother, Judith, had died, and Noel was then only a tiny child. It was probably all his own fault; he had been too young, and too self-centred with grief to play the devoted widower father. Hetty, as nanny, and later as his neglected wife, had raised the children, not he.
‘Sins of the fathers,’ he said, aloud. Sam turned from the window.
‘What?’ he said. Harry shook his head.
‘I say,’ he said brightly, ‘sun’s surely over the yardarm? Fancy a brandy?’ Sam nodded, watching his great-uncle deliberately shaking off whatever mood of sour philosophy had struck him. Harry poured brandies from the decanter on his desk, and sat down again by the fire. Sam wandered around, sipping his drink, and looking at the books. Harry watched. It was, he knew, always a mistake to try to make people into a role simply because they are born to it. He probably would never have been close to Noel, regardless. He didn’t like the man. And he was closer to Sam than many fathers ever managed to be with their own sons. The trouble, he realized, the trouble that was plaguing him more and more was that, although bloodlines did not determine love, they did yet, traditionally, determine inheritance. And tradition was deep in Harry Hardacre.
‘You love it here, don’t you?’ he said suddenly to Sam, without bothering to look round to him.
‘Of course.’ He heard pages turning, and wondered if the answer had been genuine or casually unthinking. He couldn’t always tell with Sam. He thought he knew him, but at times he was not fully sure. Ironically, that closeness he felt between them had grown there only since Terry’s death. Before that, both the twins were unreachable by all; no one ever broached their paired isolation. They were utterly self-sufficient, and self-delighting. As children they had lived in a world apart, even, as many twins, speaking a private, self-invented language. He remembered them darting about the house and gardens, two quicksilver shadows. It had occurred to him early on that they were spared the great human burden of loneliness, a most unusual state that set them ever apart. Loneliness, he had realized then, is the one breach in the shuttered fortress of the human soul. Those who are not lonely cannot be reached, unless they so choose. Terry’s death changed that. He knew Sam came here sometimes because now he, too, was lonely; he came seeking company like anyone else, and he had become thus reachable at last.
Harry toyed with his glass, wondering how to approach, and then abruptly lost his nerve. It was not easy. Sam spoke to him from his desk.
‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘What’s what?’
‘Newspaper cutting. From The Times.’ There was a pause. ‘21 September. It’s about mineworkers.’
‘Oh yes. Yes, of course, I’d meant to show you that. Jane sent it down from Scotland. Look at the picture.’
‘I am.’ Sam was studying the cutting, holding-it up to the fading light by the window.
‘Recognize anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Neither did I. Look at the caption.’
Sam read, ‘Newly elected local secretary, George R. Emmerson.’
‘Mean anything?’ Harry sipped his brandy.
�
��No. Oh God, yes. Geordie Emmerson. That’s who it is, isn’t it. RAF pal of Peter’s; I think I met him.’
‘Mavis’s brother, Sam. That’s why Jane sent it.’
‘Of course,’ Sam said. ‘You know, I’d forgotten they were brother and sister. Mavis Emmerson, of course. Jane hadn’t heard from her or anything?’
‘No. No, she just saw the article in The Times. He’s becoming quite the big panjandrum, I gather. Made his name last year in that dispute over faceworkers.’
‘I remember he was pretty fiery.’
‘Damned Bolshie,’ grumbled Harry. Sam grinned. He stayed out of politics with Harry. His own were complex and disjointed. He had a sneaking sympathy for the working man, because he often worked as one but, on the other hand, he got annoyed when the government got in his way.
‘She didn’t think of trying to contact Mavis?’ Sam asked.
‘I think she thought of it, and thought better. Jane tends to give people credit for knowing what they want. Mavis knew where we all were, if she wanted us.’
Sam nodded. He didn’t suppose they’d any of them gain by prying into a life that was abruptly closed to them all those years ago. Yet he’d never understood her sudden defection. They had had good times together, all of them, Peter, Mavis, Terry and himself, and whatever vanished wartime girls they had been courting then. Good, frenetic, wartime days and nights, all gone, and perhaps best left untouched by prying memories. Perhaps it had been simply her grief over Peter; grief took everyone in different ways. Perhaps she had run, as he had done, to the solace of solitude, and never returned. He turned the paper over, idly. The back of it was covered with a dissected article on Suez, which covered so much newsprint these days. It had been much on his mind, partly because Jan had been so disturbed by it and had even spoken of going back to Israel, to enter the armed forces there again. Janet had been almost hysterical. She had not, as they had done, lived through war, and did not believe it could be survived. He said abruptly, ‘What do you think will happen in the Near East?’