Hunter's Green

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  There was only one near giveaway for me. That was when the maid, Nellie, who was passing cakes, the picture of perfection in her black uniform and white patch of organdy apron, looked straight into my face and nearly dropped the plate in my lap. I thanked her hastily, managing to shake my head slightly at the same time. She recovered with a gulp or two and went on about the room. Once Nellie had been my friend in an alien place.

  The man who had come in with Maggie took no part in the ceremony of the Tea Tour. He bowed courteously enough to everyone in general, but he did not accompany Maggie about the room. He stood, teacup in hand, looking out upon a sun-dappled terrace through the farthest French window. I caught the shine of jewels in his cuff links—and suddenly knew who he was.

  Nigel Barrow had come to Athmore on a visit from his home in the Bahamas when I had met him here that other time. His complexion had been far more tan from the islands’ sun than it was now, and he had not worn a mustache then. His graying hairline had receded a bit more too, though he was only a year or so older than Justin. The ostentatious cuff links identified him for me. They had always puzzled me, being worn by so quiet and unassuming a man. His business, as I recalled, had something to do with building and real estate in the Bahamas, and I gathered that he had made enough money to sport jeweled cuff links if he chose. He was unmarried, and Justin and Marc and Maggie had long considered him one of the family because Justin had taken him up when they were boys together in the same school. Justin had come to the school by right of birth, while Nigel Barrow had attained it the hard way—by winning himself a difficult scholarship. Justin had brought him home one holiday, and the family had more or less adopted him. I remembered him especially because of a rather embarrassing conversation I had once had with him.

  He saw me looking in his direction and smiled faintly, raising his cup in discreet greeting. Maggie must have warned him of my presence. He was a quiet, well-mannered man, rather slight in build, but wiry and active. I recalled that he could outride the gentry at hounds, and he had taken up the sport, riding whenever it was possible. I remembered this fact very well, because all I could do with a horse was tumble off it. Once, when Justin had ridden past me in a fury, Nigel Barrow had come to pick me up and dust me off. Justin had never been able to understand why everyone could not learn to stay in a saddle. He thought I was stubborn and fell off to annoy him. After all, as he so often pointed out, wasn’t my chief mission in life trying to torment and annoy him? Justin had never understood anything about me—never! And I mustn’t start shaking again.

  Maggie moved from guests to tea table and back, and once she stepped to the window to speak to Nigel. I saw her put her left hand lightly on his arm, caught again the shine of the star sapphire on her engagement finger. The jewels in Nigel’s cuff links were star sapphires! My heart sank a little. How could he be right for Maggie Graham? He was an outsider. For all that Athmore had once been almost like a home to him, he wasn’t born to it, or born to what it stood for.

  I choked on a crumb of biscuit, catching myself up. Was I really such a snob? I, who was more of an outsider than Nigel could ever be! I who had never lived comfortably at Athmore and never could—not if I were here a hundred years. Not only Justin, but the house itself had rejected me. So what was I doing here in the red drawing room drinking English tea and thinking critically of a man who was essentially kind, if not to the manor born?

  The tea hour ended at last, and Miss Davis made little shooing gestures that brought us to our feet. I meant to leave with the others. I meant to plant myself solidly in their midst, but Maggie went smoothly into action and cut me out from the rest. They flowed through the Hall of Armor without me, and Maggie led me toward the stairs.

  “Your room is ready,” she said. “I’ve had your bag brought in from the bus and it was explained to the driver that you’re staying over with us. Run upstairs and get settled. Ring for Nellie when you’re ready and let me know when we can have a talk. Nellie is yours again while you’re here, in between her other duties.”

  There was no resisting her. I was like that nineteen-year-old I had once been—ready clay for anyone to mold, and eager to be molded. I had been trying desperately to find out who I was in those days, and only too eager to be what anyone I liked thought me. The difficulty was that I had never set properly in any one pattern. I could never stay fired in the Athmore kiln. Afterward I always crumbled back into my own uncertain American shape, and Athmore had been decidedly upset by me.

  Nellie waited for me at the foot of the stairs, prepared for me now. In the old days an upstairs maid would never have been expected to double in the parlor, but such times were gone forever. Nellie worked where she was needed, anywhere in the house.

  Except for my dubious encounter with Old Daniel, hers was my first real welcome to Athmore. “It’s fine you’re back, Miss Eve,” she said, and I hadn’t the heart to tell her that I was far from “back.”

  How well I remembered the white staircase, its iron grillwork painted white to match and rising gracefully on either side of the steps. A red velvet carpet flowed smoothly around their elliptical curve, and the shining banister carried the eye upward and upward, from floor to floor. That staircase had always seemed to me one of the masterpieces of the house. The vast expanse of wall above, unbroken by windows, was covered with handsome family portraits, the prominent position above the lower flight being given to a full-length painting of that Mrs. Langley who had built this house and graced it with her own inventive imagination. She had ended by living in it as a widow with five marriageable daughters. How they must have made the place ring with their merry parties before the eldest found a husband and brought him home to carry on the Athmore tradition by adding a new name to the roster. The name of Dunscombe, which continued to haunt Athmore in its own particular way, though there had been no descendants of that name. The portrait of the unfortunate Mr. Dunscombe had been relegated to an upper floor. In a way, the present family was proud of him, though he was something of an embarrassment as well. Mrs. Langley had probably never approved of her son-in-law’s marriage to her darling Cynthia, but the lovely face of her eldest daughter, visible in its own portrait told its story of willful determination and perversity.

  Nellie paid no attention to the paintings as she climbed. Her curious sidelong glances were all for me. She had been my favorite of the Athmore staff when I’d come here three years ago, and while I had never been able to resign myself to the ministrations of a lady’s maid, Nellie and I had got along very well. I knew about her deaf grandfather and her rheumatic mother. I knew about the young man from the village who was courting her, and I noticed now the wedding band on her hand.

  She told me readily as we climbed the stairs. She had married her Jamie, but recently he had taken a fall from a roof he was helping a neighbor to shingle. His back had been that bad he could not work as helper to the village chemist for a time. So Nellie had returned to Athmore, which was always understaffed, and glad enough she was to be helping out with her man. He was better now, but she would stay on awhile.

  “Miss Maggie has put you in the blue lady’s room, Miss Eve,” she said. “Up on the second floor, rear. Where you can see the top’ry garden and the lawns.”

  “Second floor” meant the third floor to me, and I always called it so. English houses started at ground floor, with the first floor above, and I was constantly confused.

  “Oh, it’s right that you’re back, Miss Eve!” she ran on. “We’ve been proper fearful for Mr. Justin, I can tell you. It will be a pity if he marries that—”

  “Hush!” I said. “I haven’t come to stay, Nellie. It’s just that there are some—some things that need doing before—”

  I floundered and she did not help me. She simply looked at me with sad reproach on her plump-cheeked face, and said nothing more as we mounted the stairs together. Mrs. Langley’s five daughters watched us climb, and probably mocked me from their separate portraits, knowing very well that this tim
e I would not last even as long as I had the first.

  Nellie took me through the long gallery on the top floor and into a corridor in the north wing that led to the blue lady’s room. When she had left me I stood in the center of the room and looked about at blue canopied bed, blue carpet and draperies, blue upholstery—all very rich and faded and worn. The old nonsense ran through my mind. Was this the blue lady’s room? Or was it the room of a blue lady? Oh, the latter, surely, I thought a little wildly. Of course it was the room of a very blue lady!

  There were tears on my cheeks without warning. It was a lovely room, but it was not my room. The room I had shared so joyfully—and sometimes miserably—with Justin was far larger than this, and adjoining it had been a lovely small dressing room which Justin had let me decorate especially for myself.

  Nellie had already unpacked my things, and a dressing gown lay across the bed, with slippers on the floor beside it. I kicked the slippers away and flung myself down across the blue coverlet. Two years ago, when I left, I hadn’t been able to cry except when I’d said goodbye to Deirdre. But I wept now, and pounded my fists upon the pillow. Tingling blood throbbed again through frozen veins, and the pain was almost more than I could bear.

  Almost. Not quite. One endured what had to be endured, I was learning. Or did something about it. That was why I was here—to do something. To make the amputation complete. A missing part could throb endlessly, no matter how lost, unless both mind and body accepted the severance, admitted it, said “gone is gone,” and learned to get along without.

  Tears were a waste of time. Therapeutic, perhaps, but I had too much to do. I must see Maggie, settle matters once and for all, and be out of this place tomorrow. I would leave word that I would not oppose Justin’s action. I would behave with dignity and firm decision. My meeting with him had made everything quite clear, so that now I could act.

  I got up resolutely and washed my face, combed my hair free of tangles and fastened a band around it to hold it back. It was a style Justin had always liked—young and free and without artifice, he said. Like Alice in Wonderland, I thought looking in the mirror. And who else could I possibly be? That was the trouble, and I felt every bit as confused as Alice, no matter what I told myself about acting with firm decision and dignity. There was no certainty in me, no confidence which lasted. That was the trouble. Yet now, somehow, I must acquire these qualities. I could not go on playing Alice all my life.

  I found the bell and rang for Nellie, who came so quickly she must have lingered down the hall. I asked her to see if Mrs. Graham would speak with me now. Then I went to stand at one of the two windows of my corner room. The window was open, of course. Windows were always open in English homes, it seemed to me. I reached to pull it shut against the late afternoon chill and heard the sound of singing coming from another room on my own floor. I knew that voice from American radio and television, where the singer was currently popular.

  Who in the world at Athmore could be playing a recording of Petula Clark? I wondered and leaned into the window opening to listen.

  II

  The singer’s voice came to me clearly and the words of the song:

  For all we know

  We may never meet again …

  Tomorrow may never come …

  The plaintive song of some years before was brought to fresh life with the modern beat of Petula Clark. I didn’t want to hear it. I did not want those words, that tune to start humming through my mind.

  I started to close the window when movement on the ground arrested me. This was the side of the house which overlooked the garage and stables. The buildings were set back at a fair distance from the house and partly screened by a splendid row of young beech trees. The driveway wound between these buildings and the house, and two men were crossing into view—Justin and his brother Marc.

  Hidden by the blue draperies at my window, I studied Marc warily. His fair hair shone in the later afternoon sun, and I knew his eyes would be as heartbreakingly blue as ever. Not that they had ever broken my heart. Marc was too ultra good-looking to appeal to me. I liked a man to be more virile and rugged. There was a delicacy about Marc’s features which gave them that slightly inbred look one sometimes finds in young Englishmen of good family.

  My flesh crept a little as I watched him approach the house with Justin. Even though the fault for what had happened two years ago had been as much mine as it had been Marc’s, and I had tried to use him for my own angry purpose, he had managed to use me far more cleverly. I had never quite fathomed his motives—they were too devious and obscure for any simple understanding. Certainly he had done nothing to help me once the chips were down. I knew more than ever that I wanted to be away from Athmore before I met him again.

  The brothers seemed to be arguing heatedly as they approached the house, and Justin looked more glowering than ever. Once Marc glanced up toward the window from which Petula Clark’s tones were throbbing and I drew hastily back, lest his eyes pick me out at my window. Had he been told that I was here? I wondered. And I wondered too—as I had so often—how he had reconciled his position with his brother after I had fled from Athmore.

  Since I could not bear to watch these two, I turned to the rear window which overlooked the topiary garden, thinking once more about my strange meeting with Old Daniel in the woods. His curious eagerness to see me—whom he had always regarded as a foreigner, with no right to stay at Athmore—had been altogether out of key. What was it he had tried to tell me about the chess game? “It’s the rook’s play,” he had said. I was to remember that. But of course it was the rook’s play! That, at least, I understood. Out on the grassy spaces of the vast chessboard one move of the black rook would place the white king in check. So it was forever up to White to save the game and save the white king by counterstrategy. Everyone knew this who lived at Athmore. So why had Old Daniel urged the fact upon me and warned me that the white king had better “watch out.”

  Nellie’s knock on my door rescued me from unanswered questions and I hurried to open it. The news that Maggie would see me in her sitting room right away was welcome. Now I could finish what I had to do and leave for London tomorrow. There must be no wavering, no more indecision. I told myself there was just one thing I wanted to make sure of first—that the pictures I had taken had turned out well. I removed the film from the camera, talking to Nellie as I did so.

  “Your Jamie used to make a hobby of photography, didn’t he? Do you suppose he could develop this roll for me and print a set of pictures? I’d like very much to make sure they came out before I leave tomorrow.”

  She took the roll and slipped it into her pocket. “Of course he’ll be glad to do them for you, Miss. I’ll bring them for sure when I come in tomorrow morning. He’s sold off his enlargement camera, but he can still do developing and printing.”

  We went into the corridor together, and Nellie cocked an ear in the direction of the music that came faintly from behind a closed door toward the front of the house.

  “She’s at it day and night that one,” she said, with no great respect for the presence of a guest, and free with me as she would never have been with other members of the family.

  “Who is she?” I asked.

  Nellie rolled her eyes. “That’s Miss Dacia—Mr. Marc’s latest.” Her shrug indicated disapproval. I had no interest in Marc’s women and I asked no more questions.

  “You needn’t come with me, Nellie,” I said. “I haven’t forgotten the way.”

  A little uncertainly she left me and went off toward the back stairs, perhaps remembering how I had managed to get lost in the house when I had first lived here.

  I hurried through the long gallery that connected north and south wings, with a fleeting glance at the remote wall to which Mr. Dunscombe’s portrait had been relegated. There had been a time when I had felt a certain comradely sympathy for that unhappy son-in-law, but I had no time to pay my respects now. On the floor below, the stairway opened into the great library, and
I went through the doorway with a familiar sense of recognition.

  The word “great” aptly described the room. The library occupied the area directly above the Hall of Armor. The wide boards of its darkly polished floor were bare except for occasional small rugs, and bookcases reached from floor to high ceiling along every available wall. Three chandeliers marched the length of the ceiling, and there was comfortable room at either end for two fireplaces. Chairs and sofas grouped themselves down the room, but there were oases for the solitary reader as well, with a lamp suitably placed, or a tall window which could light the room brightly when the sun was shining. I had always liked the library, for all that it could turn to gloom and shadow by night, or on a gray winter’s day.

  At the far end a doorway let me into the second-floor corridor of the south wing, and I followed it toward Maggie’s rooms at the rear. Marc’s apartment had occupied the front end of the house off this corridor, I remembered, and was probably still there, since Athmore was not a house given to change.

  Maggie’s bedroom was a spacious affair, with a smaller sitting room opening off it and overlooking the rear corner of the floor. It was at the open door of this room that I paused. Inside, a fire burned cozily—in my honor, undoubtedly, since Americans were always cold in English houses.

  Maggie was waiting for me. “Come in,” she called, “and do close the door after you. We’ll need to have an uninterrupted chat, won’t we?”

  Her tone lacked warmth and I knew that we had moved a long way from our old affectionate relationship. In the beginning Maggie had not accepted me with enthusiasm as Justin’s impulsively acquired bride, but lame ducks had always been her specialty, and when she decided that I was one she had given me her ready friendship—even guardianship—providing I took a willing third place to Marc and Justin. Of course in the end she had discovered that instead of being a satisfactory lame duck, I was only a square peg—and a bit defiantly so—unable to fit into the well-grooved round holes of Athmore. But I had loved Maggie Graham, and I hated to lose her as my friend.