The sound of the sea hit me, as it always did, as I came to the end of the path. The thing I most remember now about all that time, but did not consciously notice then, is the way the sound of the sea on the beach, which never left us, built up steadily, until it came to form a continuous background to everything any of us did or said. Only in the middle of the wood, throughout all the time, was it ever properly quiet; and the middle of the wood is not the place I choose to remember.
I turned to the right along the edge of the wood, opened my mouth to shout and was picked out immediately in the steady glare of a torch.
‘Jake? Did you hear anything?’
‘Yes. Didn’t you? Very faint, but fairly definite. I followed the line as far as the path. Then I realised you hadn’t come, so I came back.’
‘Damn. Oh damn.’ She sounded dreadfully disappointed.
‘Have you got anything to go on, do you think?’
‘Not much. I should say about fifty yards along the path and then a bit off to the right. Let’s get in, shall we? I need a drink.’
‘All right. I tell you what. Tomorrow evening I’m going to put the recorder where you say and lie up near it myself. If we’re near enough, I may get him first time. If he speaks up within earshot, but too far for a recording, I’ll shift the recorder nearer. It’s the same idea, only short-circuited a bit. We started too far out tonight.’
‘We had to start somewhere. And at least we know he’s there and have some idea where he is.’ I was not thinking about nycticorax at all. We walked back side by side, with the wind blowing steadily in our faces and the sea-noises rising and falling round our heads, as far apart mentally as if we lived at opposite ends of the seven-mile beach and had never met. My mind was full, as Elizabeth’s was, of what I had met in the wood that evening and what I hoped I should meet there tomorrow. But neither of these was nycticorax. She talked incessantly, and with the terrible and instinctive skill of long propinquity I kept up my end of the conversation and thought of what Carol Wainwright would look like, and what she would say, and whether I should ever get over the complete and instantaneous devastation of her sudden upwards smile. The lit hall showed Elizabeth flushed and anxious, and I saw with a faintly regretful but quite resigned detachment that she was still, at times, a beautiful woman. We waved our glasses cheerfully at each other, but I did not know clearly what I was drinking to, and I am certain Elizabeth did not.
I slept even worse than I had the night before, and all night the sea pounded on the beach. It has two rhythms, the incessant, almost momentary beat of the waves and the vastly slower advance and retreat of the tides. Only a long and concentrated session of night-listening established the second in one’s consciousness. The beach was a steep one, and the lateral movement of the breaking line was not large. But it was recognisable, and served to intensify the timelessness that is the wicked essence of real insomnia. I did not much care for the look of myself in the morning, and wondered whether Elizabeth would notice anything, but she had slept soundly and woken up full of fresh and beautiful ideas for catching nycticorax, and my misery was lost on her. This had irritated me so often in the past that it needed a conscious effort of the will to remind myself that now I did not want her to notice anything, and that her sympathy, even if I had it, would be nothing but an embarrassment. Both being, in our own way, anxious to bundle time away, we agreed to go shopping in the morning, and took the car to Burtonbridge, where the shops were still new enough to be entertaining, and we had yet to find the best places for coffee and butcher’s meat. Elizabeth got lost in the ornithological section of the County Library, and was mildly surprised at my feverish impatience to be back at the usual time for lunch.
At lunch she got on to the subject of Stella’s painting, which I did not understand very well myself, but certainly understood a lot better than Elizabeth. This was familiar ground for manoeuvre. She had two standard openings: ‘I can’t think why she doesn’t—’ and ‘It always seems to me that—’. Regardless of what followed, in the first case I could always think of a dozen good reasons why she should not, and in the second whatever always seemed to Elizabeth never seemed to me. Elizabeth knew this perfectly well, and was secure of the best of both worlds. If I could be drawn into explanation or defence, she would have the righteous satisfaction of thinking, even if she did not say, that Stella talked to me more than she did to her (which of course was perfectly true), and that my ability to explain or wish to defend was in some obscure way an affront to her. If I refused to be drawn, she was left to air her opinions, knowing that they irritated me as much as they would have irritated Stella, but that I was less technically equipped to rebut them and in any case strategically inhibited from doing so. She never, in fact, or only in extreme cases, complained of anything Stella did to Stella herself. She complained to me, not because she expected me to do anything about it, but because her indignation when I did not somehow compensated her for the wrong she thought she had suffered at Stella’s hands.
The one thing Elizabeth never suspected was that on this occasion my refusal to be drawn was, virtually for the first time, based on genuine indifference. I was in a fever to be off to the wood, and could not be bothered with either my wife or my sister-in-law. When I eventually got away, I was twenty minutes later than I had been on the last two afternoons. The fact that I had no understanding with Carol Wainwright to meet her at any particular time, or indeed to meet her at all, meant next to nothing to me. I had to be there in case.
I walked the whole length of the central path in growing distress and did not meet her. When I came to the far end, I looked cautiously from the shelter of the trees at the blank face of the red brick house, but could see nothing and nobody. I walked all the way back and then, not knowing what else I could do, turned to walk eastwards again. I was half-way back when a hope born of desperation turned me southward towards the overgrown ride and the small twisting run that zig-zagged along its centre. I went regardless now, blundering through the obstacles in my almost intolerable anxiety, until the track jinked suddenly and I was in the circular clearing. Carol Wainwright sat with her back to me on one of the fallen logs. She must have heard me coming from some way back, but for a long second she still sat there and I stood silent watching her back. Then she seemed to take a breath and, getting up, almost ran to me, holding out both her hands.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I have no intention of recording in detail the progress of my affair with Carol Wainwright. When she had talked about deciding to fall in love with me, she had meant exactly what she said. She always knew what was happening to her better than anyone I have ever known. She was ready, even over-ready, to fall in love with someone, and she decided to let it be me. If this sounds cold-blooded, I can only say that there was in my experience very little cold blood in her. She stepped deliberately into the current, not knowing, as she had warned me, how fast or how far it would take her. It took her very fast and very far.
I myself at this time lived in a fever of alternating ecstasy and despair which makes it very difficult for me to get, at this distance, a reasonable picture of what it was really like. What I must make clear, partly in my own justification and partly to make sense of what followed, is that there was none of the smug excitement of the bored husband who discovers a complaisant young farmer’s wife in the next village, and wonders how far he can run things without upsetting the applecart. On the contrary, I had found, beyond all expectation, the only woman I could bear to spend the rest of my life with; and I was appalled both at the thought of giving her up and at the thought of what would be involved if I did not. In the meantime, we both accepted that secrecy was essential. So far as the mechanics of the thing went, it might have been the farmer’s wife. If the cynic finds cause for amusement in this, let him live through what I lived through and keep smiling.
We met, as we had first met, in the wood, which Carol knew by heart and in detail. ‘I’ve spent half my time here,’ she said. ‘The garden is
Dennis’s, and I don’t like the beach, except when it’s hot and still. There’s no peace to be had. But no one ever came into the wood, not in your uncle’s time.’
‘The first time I saw you, you asked me whether I had come through the wood. I wondered why.’
‘I had to know, don’t you see? I had to know whether you were the sort of person who would choose to walk through the wood rather than come round by car.’
‘And were horrified when I said I had? You didn’t look it. You didn’t look anything. You just nodded.’
‘Not horrified, Jake. If you had been anyone else – but with you it was an additional qualification.’
‘Does your husband know what the wood means to you?’ I could never bring myself to call him Dennis when I was talking to Carol. With Elizabeth, who at this stage had still not met him, he could be Dennis or our Dennis, but not with Carol. I avoided, as far as I could, mentioning him at all. If I had to, I talked about her husband. It rubbed an extra grain or two of salt in the wound every time I did it, but for some reason it made the thing less like the farmer’s wife.
She said, ‘I don’t know. I hope not.’
‘I wondered if that was why he bought it.’
Her head had been against me, but now she twisted away suddenly and looked me in the face. Her eyes were very wide open but the whole face deliberately blank. ‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘Well, what I said. Nothing complicated. I thought he might have bought it because he knew you liked it. We agreed it was an odd thing for him to do.’
She said, ‘I hope to God not.’ And that was all I could get out of her.
Presently she pushed me away and said, ‘I must go and get tea.’ She has quite decisive and matter-of-fact about it. Our time together was demarcated for us by the hours of Dennis Wainwright’s meals. Elizabeth was much more interested in nycticorax’s movements than in mine, and would not have minded much when I came in during the day, but in fact our life at the Holt House moved in a curious and unconscious harmony with the life they lived at the other end of the wood, and I seldom had a late arrival to explain. The fact that I ate very little apparently went unnoticed. The fact that I slept, or seemed to sleep, hardly at all was, of course, my own affair. In any but the very young it takes an awful lot of sleeplessness to produce any marked physical symptoms.
Carol came and went, not by the main path, but by devious tracks of her own which brought her out at various points near the south-east corner of the wood. I made my way back to the central path. I was always conscious of a sense of relief when I got there, as if to regain my physical right-of-way somehow neutralised what had happened when I left it. I cannot, and never could, find the least glimmer of logic in this, but I know that if Carol had come to meet me in what was my wood, and not her husband’s, the atmosphere would have been very different. What his own view on his proprietary rights were I did not, of course, know. I never saw him: and even if I had, he was a man, both on Carol’s account of him and to my own observation, who would guard his views on almost any subject as though they were an obscene secret – which on some matters they very likely were. I believed myself that he walked in the wood at night, or at least had done so on one occasion. I did not mention this to Carol, because I knew it would worry her, and because in any case I did not, as I have said, mention her husband to her more than I could possibly help. It was not in fact until I had met her three or four times that I saw him again at all; and that was in the wood; and by daylight.
Carol had taken herself away from me in that curiously abrupt and decisive way she had, that contrasted so oddly with her behaviour when she was with me, and slipped off through the thicket with hardly a rustle, making for the beach and the bottom of the tarmac road. I forced my way up towards the path, moving confusedly through the haze of exultation and loss she generally left me in. As I got nearer the path I made less and less attempt to go quietly. I was in fact talking to myself audibly, though probably hardly above a whisper.
‘J’aime ta voix, j’aime l’étrange
Grâce de tout ce que tu dis.
Ô ma rebelle, ô mon cher ange,
Mon enfer et mon paradis.’
One of the many things I still do not know about Dennis Wainwright is whether he understood French – my French, anyhow. He was standing in the path, not five yards from the point where I came out on to it. He had evidently heard me coming, and was standing stock-still, waiting for me, or at any rate waiting to see who it was. He wore, of all things, breeches and gaiters and carried what might not unfairly have been called a cudgel. He was still smiling at his unexplained joke, looking at me under his heavy brows with his head slightly lowered. He would have been a formidable figure in anyone’s eyes. To me, at that particular moment and in those particular circumstances, he looked almost unbelievably sinister.
He did not say anything. For my part, my instinct to have as little to do with the man as possible was strengthened by the fact that I could not think of anything suitable to say. But I could not ignore him altogether, and I was in any case un-willing, for reasons I did not examine, to turn my back on him. I therefore turned and walked slowly up the path towards him. By this time I had got my wits back, and I smiled, not, I think, pleasantly but resolutely, into his smile. When we were about a yard apart, the limits of social tolerance snapped and he spoke. He said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Haddon. Have you been exploring my property?’
‘Yes,’ I said. My smile was now really pleasant. ‘Yes, I have. To tell you the truth, I had formed the impression, rightly or wrongly, that you did not take very much interest in it.’
Without raising his head at all, he shook it, very slowly, from side to side. It could pass, I suppose, for a negative head-shake, but the effect was so startlingly animal that I almost expected him to charge at any moment. Instead he moved his hands, stick and all, behind his back and stood there looking down on me. I stopped just in front of him. I remember thinking quite consciously that he could not, at that range, reach me with his stick without moving his feet.
He said, ‘Oh yes? Wrongly, I’m afraid. I take a considerable interest in what belongs to me. Of course, you weren’t to know that.’
I nodded. ‘Quite so,’ I said. ‘Still, I could not help wondering what made you decide to buy this wood, and whether you have any plans for it.’
‘The wood? I have not had the wood very long, you know. I am considering plans for it, certainly.’
I knew it was no good, but I thought even his reaction might make the question worth while. I said, ‘You would not consider selling it to me, I suppose? I am very interested in forestry, and should be glad to have the chance of seeing what I could do with it.’
I should, of course, have known better than to expect to get any satisfaction from observing Dennis Wainwright’s reaction to this or anything else. There was, visibly, none, except that he reverted to his previous trick of seeming to weigh exhaustively his answer to a question which could obviously have only one. Finally he said, ‘Oh no, Mr Haddon. I could not consider that at all.’
‘No?’ I said. ‘Well, I thought it was worth asking you. I shall be interested to see how your plans develop.’
He nodded. I am not sure whether he had ever quite stopped smiling, but now certainly the smile was there. I did not like it any better than I ever had. He said, ‘I’m sure you will. In the meantime—’ he brought his hands quite suddenly from behind his back. The stick was as big as ever. ‘In the meantime, Mr Haddon, I hope we shall manage to respect each other’s property.’
I bowed. I was still watching the stick. ‘Speaking for myself,’ I said, ‘you can be sure of it.’
He hesitated. Heaven forbid that I should make any claim to have been left in possession of the field, but he did have his moment of visible uncertainty. Then he bowed, very slightly, in return, and turned and went off towards his end of the wood. I watched him for a moment. He walked quite quickly, but there was a rigidity about the back which I did
not think could be quite natural. I tried to remember the footsteps I had heard going off along the path after our first abortive attempt on nycticorax, but I could make nothing of the comparison. To watch him longer seemed a concession I was unwilling to make, and I turned to go. I wondered where Carol had got to, and whether she was by now clear of the wood; but there was nothing I could do about it, and I kept on walking.
When I came to the gate I found Carol and Elizabeth walking side-by-side down the path to meet me. I realised afterwards that if Carol had left the wood by the shortest path and walked straight along the top of the beach, there was no difficulty in her reaching the Holt House well before me, especially after my encounter with her husband. But I had got it so much into my head that she had gone back to the red brick house, that the sight of her on our pathway, talking to Elizabeth, nearly stopped my heart. They were talking very pleasantly. As I appeared at the gate, they both flicked their eyes up momentarily, took me in, and then went on with their conversation. There was no change of expression or visible reaction at all. I had seen women do this before and always found it a little unnerving, but to undergo it from my wife and the woman I loved was shattering.
For the second time in almost a matter of minutes I marched steadily up to an unknown quantity, collecting my wits for the social encounter which physical proximity, if nothing else, was bound to bring on. At exactly the same moment Elizabeth said, ‘Hullo, Jake,’ and Carol gave me her social smile. ‘You have met each other, haven’t you?’ Elizabeth said. ‘Mrs Wainwright has looked in to make my acquaintance.’
‘I was walking along the beach,’ Carol said, ‘and it seemed less than civil to go past without turning in. But I must go now. I have my husband’s tea to get.’ She looked at me, for a moment, between the eyes with the faintest flicker of her real smile.
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