The Holm Oaks

by P. M. Hubbard

  Something happened, and he sat back suddenly on his heels. He had some green thing in his hands. I think he must have broken something by mistake. He had a green half in each big grey hand and shook his head over it, muttering. He even tried, as a child might have done, to fit them together again, but desperately, as if he knew it was no use. For a moment he knelt there, quite disconsolate. He was a ridiculous figure. Then he threw one half of whatever it was away with a savage and unnecessary violence and bent to put the other back into the bed. He sighed as he stooped over it, a sigh of such intensity that it travelled visibly backwards along his bowed body and swayed the high lights on the polished seat of his trousers.

  I left the gate and stepped back into the road. I had rubber soles but had not come with any conscious effort at quietness. Now I backed away as from a land-mine, straight back across the width of the road until I was well hidden under his front hedge. Then I turned, even then reluctantly, and tiptoed to the stile at the end of the footpath. I remember noticing that it was of a slightly different pattern from the stile at our end. There was no significance in the difference. It was merely as if the contractor had not happened to have two exactly similar stiles in stock. It offended my sense of symmetry, but I did not linger over it.

  It was only when I was in the wood that I noticed that the wind was getting up again. It is possible that the wind had only then, in fact, arrived, or the eastern end of the wood may have been largely sheltered by the great bulk of the trees stretching away behind it. But now the wind was everywhere. As usual, it did not make much noise under the trees, but it made a continuous background of restless sound in the top branches. It covered the noise of anything moving in the wood, and I was glad the pigs were no longer there. The noise I did hear was quite close to the left-hand side of the path before I heard it. I stopped, and a moment later Carol came out from among the trees ahead and turned along the path to meet me. She was breathless as if she had been running. So in fact she must have been. She must have gone down on to the beach, or even crossed the road lower down, while I was standing at the gate and come in to head me off. I did not know how long I had stayed at the gate, but it could not have been long between the time I saw her in the window and the time I climbed back over the stile into the wood.

  She said, ‘Jake. Jake, I mustn’t stay. He comes into the wood quite often now, and he will if he finds I’m gone. I saw you standing at the gate. I was afraid. I didn’t know what he’d do if he saw you. I tried to signal to you, but you were watching him. I couldn’t make a sound. It was like a nightmare. I thought I’d head you off in case you went through the wood. But I didn’t really think you’d come this way.’

  She gave me her hands and we stood like that, looking at each other. She got her breath slowly, and when she spoke again, it was much more like her usual voice. She said, ‘Do you think you know what happened? Your wife, I mean.’

  ‘Not yet. Not to be certain. But Carol, for God’s sake—’

  She was not listening to me. Her eyes were over my shoulder, staring at their end of the wood. She whispered, ‘I don’t know – I thought – Jake, I must go. Can you meet me on the beach this evening? Just below the trees, about half-way along. I can get out then for a bit. About half past five. Then it will be dark before I’m home. Please, Jake.’ She took her hands out of mine and ran off through the wood. She ran southward, towards the beach. She never made much noise at any time, but now the sound of her going was swallowed almost at once by the noise of the wind in the tops of the trees. The whole wood seemed full of movement. I stood still for quite a long time, waiting for a sound which I did not want to hear, and which never came. But there were sounds everywhere. It was still not mid-morning, but the wood was surprisingly dark. What with the darkness and the whispering, it might have been full of people, but there was no one to be seen. I walked off steadily along the central path, trying not to run. I wished I had my ridiculous alpenstock, but it would have been no use against what I felt was in the wood.

  I was almost at the end of the path when I remembered that when I had left the Holt House, I had gone northwards, by the mere. I did not want to be seen coming back from the near end of the wood. I went cautiously to the end of the path and looked out, but could see no one. Then I turned northwards, just inside the edge of the trees, and picked my way back to the track. It meant climbing the fence again, but I knew now that this was no great obstacle. I crossed the track a little way along the top of the wood, just out of sight of the house, and made my way back under the bank of the mere.

  When I got to the gate I found Stella standing just inside it. She was looking across to the wood and hardly seemed to notice me when I came down the road. The noise of the sea was everywhere now, and she may not have heard me.

  I said, ‘It’s blowing up again.’ She nodded but said nothing. She was still staring at the wood. I went past her and into the house, and presently she followed me in. The house was as dark as the wood had been. The line To the dark house and the detested wife kept running in my head. Only I knew my wife was dead. The whole sky to the south-west was black, and the wind blew out from under it in gusts of steadily increasing violence. It would be blowing us off the beach long before nightfall, and almost certainly raining as well. My whole mind steadily counted time on its way to half past five. I reckoned I could reasonably leave the house at five. Things would be terrible by then, and to go out walking at all would look like simple lunacy. But of course I no longer had to account to anyone for my actions. It was not always easy to remember that. Only I hoped tea would come on early, to give me time to get away without obviously rushing it.

  The whole of that interminable afternoon I prowled about the dark shuddering house. As I had expected, the rain came down about half past three, driven against the southern and western windows with such violence that I thought at times it must be hail. The thing I remember most clearly, looking back, was coming upstairs and seeing Stella, in silhouette, looking out of a landing window at the black, tormented sea. She did not seem to hear me in the general uproar, but as I came up to her, she shivered suddenly and violently, and then turned and darted into the door of what had been Elizabeth’s room. So far as I know, she never knew I was there. I did not see what she was doing in the empty bedroom. The door shut quietly behind her and I did not open it.

  At four or soon after, just when I was getting worried about tea, she knocked on the door of my room and said, ‘Jake? Tea.’ It must have been quite unusually early, but I was too much relieved to notice this. It was already getting dark, even outside. The rain had lessened slightly, but it was blowing harder all the time.

  We had the lights on for tea, which made it look darker than ever outside. We did not say much. Stella still seemed to be living in a different world, and I could think clearly of nothing but meeting Carol in an hour’s time out on that storm-lashed beach. I was beginning to worry now that the weather might make it impossible for her to come and to wonder what I should do if she did not. We finished tea and Stella took the things out soon after half past four. From then on I was obsessed with the actual physical details of my going out. I do not think I ever looked beyond my projected meeting with Carol. I certainly had not made any coherent plans what to do in the light of its various possible outcomes. I was aware only of a desperate urge to get to her, that overlay, but only partially obscured, an inexplicit but almost bottomless apprehension. With the top of my mind I worried about what to wear on my head and feet. The time moved on towards five o’clock and the chaos outside turned steadily to dusk.

  At ten to five I went upstairs to my room. I took off my jacket and put on another sweater. I wound a cotton scarf round my neck and tucked the ends into the neck of the sweater. My cap, mackintosh and gumboots were all together in the hall downstairs. It could not possibly take me more than thirty seconds to put them on. I walked to the window and looked out across the top of the wood. I had no lights on, and found that it was less dark outside than I ha
d supposed. The whole ridged expanse of dark green leaves was rolling in waves under the force of the gusts. I had never seen the wood so much at the mercy of the wind. I was glad of this, because it seemed to lessen the power of the wood itself, which I had become increasingly aware of.

  I went out of the room, shutting the door carefully behind me. I went downstairs to where the coats were hanging. I took off my shoes and put on the gumboots. I belted the heavy mackintosh round me, took down my cap and made for the front door. The kitchen door opened and Stella put her head out. I started looking for words, but she did not say anything. For a second or two we looked at each other in the dark hall. Her face was quite expressionless, but she was very pale. Then she drew back into the kitchen and shut the door. I jammed my cap down on my head, opened the door and stepped outside.

  The door faced east, and for a moment I was aware of nothing but noise. There was a high pitched and almost continuous roar, in which the voices of wind and sea combined. Then as I went down the path, a gust came round the corner of the house and almost threw me at the gate. I turned right and made for the beach, head down into the wind.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The tide must have been full high and had the whole force of the wind behind it. The seas were hitting the beach at its steepest part. They came in, as always, aslant, and were sucked back under the next crest in a continuous sideways slicing movement that was horrible even to watch. I saw white stones the size of a man’s head galloping sideways down the slope in the grip of the sluicing grey water. A man who walked into that would be clubbed insensible and broken up before he had time to drown. I turned my back on the wind and sea and made my way up towards the top of the beach. The dark trees hung on grimly to the last of the land and roared together in the grip of the wind. I should not have minded going into the wood now. It was a fellow sufferer stronger than I was, and I could have taken some comfort from it. But my place was at the top of the beach. I walked up and down there, alternately throwing my weight back to resist the driving pressure of the wind behind me and forcing my way, almost crouching, into it. The sensible thing would have been to stand still, but I could not do that.

  I do not know how long it was before I saw Carol coming towards me. I had forgotten that she would have to come all along the beach from the bottom of the tarmac road. She seemed to come unbelievably slowly. She looked so small in that grey chaos and moved so slowly into the wind, that I had the illusion that she was much farther away than in fact she was. It was like watching a figure through a telescope moving almost imperceptibly through a vast landscape. Then quite suddenly she came into focus again, and was only a short distance from me. I ran to her across the pebbles, clumsily, with the wind driving me. We met and clung together, I with my legs spread and my weight back against the wind, she leaning against me for shelter. She was as breathless as if she had climbed a cliff to get to me. It was a good deal darker now. The nearest trees crouched and roared barely ten yards above me.

  For perhaps a minute she clung to me while she got her breath back, and during the whole time I believed that nothing was going to separate us. Then quite suddenly her hands tightened on my arms and she pushed herself back away from me and looked into my face. I knew at once then. I leant my head sideways to hear what she was saying, but I knew what it was going to be.

  She said, ‘Jake, he didn’t kill your wife. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know it. But I admit I can’t prove he did. But Carol—’

  ‘Jake, I can’t get away. It’s no good. I can’t leave him. I don’t want to try to explain. But it’s no good, Jake.’

  I knew it was irrelevant, but I said, ‘But Carol, you love me, don’t you?’

  She pulled back away from me until she was hardly within arm’s length. For quite a long time she looked at me. There, in that roaring chaos and near darkness, she looked at me steadily and almost dispassionately. Then she nodded, slowly and emphatically. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I love you very much indeed. I have never loved anyone else and never shall.’

  I suppose it was the nod that did it. No one who was not within a matter of feet could have heard anything she said. The first shot was fired as she stopped speaking. The charge ripped through the threshing leaves and whined, audibly even in that wind, just over our heads. I knew it was a twelve-bore and I knew that whoever it was still had the choke barrel in hand. In fact I think the second barrel was fired as I formulated the thought. I was too far from Carol to move her physically, but I had started to duck myself, willing her to do the same. I suppose to duck is common instinct. At any rate she ducked when I did, and the second charge went just over her head. One slug ripped through the dark hair and the silk scarf she had tied over it. It must have broken the skin. A small trickle of blood ran down her forehead, but she hardly seemed to feel it.

  I caught hold of her and swung her down on to the pebbles. I felt the top of her head and found she was only scratched. Then I turned and ran towards the wood. This was not particularly gallant, but was in fact the only sensible thing to do. Whoever it was had to reload and might be put off by a frontal attack. In any case it was no good staying on the beach to be shot at out of cover, and he was not likely to try another shot at Carol with me pounding through the trees looking for him. I flung myself at the fence and went over it as I now knew how to. I did it very quickly at the cost of a long strip torn from my mackintosh. It was much darker in the wood, but also, surprisingly and immediately, a lot less noisy. The roar of the wind in the tops of the trees was continuous, but quite different in quality from the trampling of a running body through the undergrowth. I could hear someone running all right, but could not be sure where they were.

  I turned eastwards instinctively. I suppose I assumed that that was where the attack had come from. It never occurred to me to think that I might be in danger. I was full of a blinding rage and wanted only to run after whoever it was until I caught them. I certainly had no clear idea what I should do when I did. I stumbled and swore in the semi-darkness, and the thicket slashed my face and hands and caught at my feet. The wood was full of a tangle of slight things that moved all the time and solid things that stood still. I was looking for a solid thing that moved. I never saw it, but presently I ran into a clearing and came face to face with a solid piece of darkness. It seemed grotesquely tall and quite motionless, but it had no branches. Dennis Wainwright had the gun pointing so directly at me that I almost blundered on to the muzzle before I saw what it was. When I saw, I stopped short, and he began to talk to me at once across the few feet of half-darkness that remained between us.

  He said, ‘I heard the shots too, Mr Haddon. Has anyone been hurt?’

  I said, ‘You ought to know, God damn it. Your wife is hit.’

  ‘Carol hit?’ He was full of a sort of angry concern, but no ordinary affection. It was like a man whose house has been robbed or a collector who has lost one of his most prized pieces. But the concern was intense and, now I come to think of it, unmistakably genuine, only I was too angry myself to let myself recognise its genuineness.

  ‘Only a scratch,’ I said. ‘You went over her head. But only just. A couple of inches lower would have killed her.’

  ‘I?’ He suddenly screamed with rage. It was a womanish sort of noise to come out of that huge black figure in the middle of the dark wood. I was chilled at the pit of my stomach by the horror of his distress and by the first creeping suspicion that it was not, after all, Dennis Wainwright who had shot at us. He moved suddenly and there was a sharp click. He had broken the gun and thrust it at me. The two unfired cartridges fell into the mud behind him, but neither of us bothered with them.

  ‘Look, Mr Haddon,’ he said. He had stopped screaming, but his voice was hoarse and trembling. ‘Look. Go on. See for yourself.’

  I tilted the barrels up to the last of the daylight and squinted through them. There is no mistaking a dead clean barrel. The gun had not been fired. I handed it back and stood there gap
ing at him. He said, ‘I have no wish to kill my wife, Mr Haddon. I do not want her dead. On the contrary, I cannot do without her at all. If anyone tried to take her away from me, I might well be tempted to consider murder, but it would not be her death I had in mind. She says you have been making love to her. I do not find that it makes very much difference to me what has happened. But you mustn’t try to take her away from me, Mr Haddon. Do you understand? You must not try that at all. Perhaps you will believe that I did not want your wife killed either. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I did not kill her. So far as I am concerned, her death was an accident I did not welcome. If you think somebody did kill her, you had better start looking at your end of the wood, don’t you think? They will have reloaded by now, I expect, so you had better go more carefully than you came this way. Now I am going to take my wife home.’

  He stooped and groped for the ejected cartridges. He wiped them very carefully and dropped them into his pocket. Then he tucked the gun under his arm and set off towards his end of the wood. I never saw him again. I turned and made up towards the central path. When I got to it, I ran westwards as fast as I could. Compared with the pace now possible in the wood, it was very fast indeed, but it was a blundering sort of run. A large part of my mind was concentrated on keeping on my feet and keeping moving. What with this and the bedlam going on above me, I was not thinking very clearly, but I knew I had to get back to the western end of the wood, and perhaps even the Holt House, as quickly as possible.