Bel Ria

by Sheila Burnford

  It was at first a stiff, very formal tea party, with both sides wary, but by some tacit understanding no mention was made — and never was — of their first meeting. Guilt was as unfamiliar an emotion to Alice Tremorne as triumph was to Neil MacLean, but disquietude was now mutual: the specter of a third and rightful owner — rightful to MacLean anyway, but to be fought to the last inch by Mrs. Tremorne — hovered uneasily and unspoken between them. This drew them unwillingly closer together. Besides, there was so much that Mrs. Tremorne wanted to know that only MacLean could unfold. By the end of the meal he was winding a ball of wool for her and, having learned that raisins and itinerant knife grinders were now unavailable, had indicated that he might be able to remedy this lack.

  Throughout Bel Ria sat between them, his eyes as always going from one face to the other as though following the conversation, relieved when rapport was reached, clearly anxious when it was restrained. When, to MacLean’s barely concealed disapproval, his customary saucer of milky tea and sugar was handed down, he handled the situation with an almost uncanny perception; cocking one eye and ear briefly in MacLean’s direction, hesitating only fractionally, he lapped his tea, then lay quietly down and closed his eyes — thus tactfully omitting his usual sitting up to beg and saluting routine, always followed by a comfortable session on Mrs. Tremorne’s lap.

  Acquaintance gradually flowered, with Bel Ria as courier for messages and observations, and as MacLean’s talent for fixing things around the house was revealed, urgent inquiries followed about what to do with a leaking pipe or a vacuum cleaner emitting alarming sparks. On receiving one of these SOSs, MacLean would arrive as soon as he had time off and put things right. Once he turned up with a pair of overalls in his gas mask haversack, then armed with a saw and a bucket of tar, he “sorted,” as he described the operation, the apple trees. Shortly after he took over the grass cutting, for the gardener could only spare an hour or so a week now, and the garden was beginning to look like a wilderness. From there it was but a short step to clearing choked gutters and drains and a coat of wood preservative on the henhouse. At first he had little to say; he would do whatever he considered had to be done and then depart, brushing aside any thanks, and refusing always to stay for any meal. It was as though he could not again bear to see his Ria of the Ark behaving as the pampered Bel of The Cedars.

  Alice Tremorne taxed him with this one day, and he admitted it bluntly: he didn’t like dogs — or any animals for that matter — made fools of with tricks and the like. She was silent for a moment. Her color was high and she looked angry; but when she spoke at last there was no sharpness in her voice, only a new almost weary tone that MacLean had not heard before.

  “I don’t think it is we who make fools of dogs,” she said slowly, “I am beginning to think that they make fools of us — they show up our needs and weaknesses somehow.” As though embarrassed by this insight she handed him a glass of her Elderberry ’38 to try. She knew now that he was not the ghostly X of her jealousy. Ria could never have danced for this man.

  MacLean sipped in silence, looking thoughtful, but whether he was considering the bouquet or her words she was not to know.

  “Aye,” he said at last; the word that she recognized by now did not necessarily mean assent, but was merely a useful noncommital. They were standing by the window upstairs, looking down and across the garden to the roofless shell of the coach house. “Yon needs sorting,” he said, with a disapproving scowl in its direction.

  “Impossible!” said Mrs. Tremorne. “This dreadful war — carpenters nowadays are either so doddery that they’d fall off the first rung of a ladder or charging so much that it would be out of the question.”

  “Indeed now!” said MacLean, his face brightening in a way that she had also come to recognize presaged the taking-up of a challenge, or the setting in order of the disorderly. Her potting shed for example was now an uncobwebbed and regimented delight.

  He left shortly afterwards, as abruptly and brusquely as ever, and she watched him walk down the drive to the gate, her heart turning over as always at the sight of her darling Bel following him, however temporarily, out of her life. “Half a loaf was better than none,” Janet had consoled with maddening logic. Indeed it was — nevertheless she still found herself longing that MacLean might be transferred to some remote, dog-debarred posting, and his half restored to her in whole impeccable poodledom once more, his lovely silken topknot unsnipped. . . .

  (There had been bitter argument over Bel Ria’s appearance. She was proud of her grooming talent, and the combing and brushing had been a pleasurable daily routine, but MacLean had wanted a reversal to the shaggy naval look, claiming stubbornly that he would look a proper twit followed by a poodle with a hair ribbon at the barracks. In the end a compromise had been reached, engineered by the diplomatic Janet: why not let his coat grow out all over, but then keep it short to something like Bedlington terrier length? Both had grudgingly accepted this, both had secretly admired the compact result; and both had suffered the same short stab of realization when they saw that a few white hairs had grown in to lightly brindle the short curly coat.)

  She knew that he had a fortnight’s leave coming up, and the thought of the consequent total separation was unbearable. Yet deep down, she had to admit that she would miss this dour little man’s unannounced visits, miss his forthrightness, the challenge of his uncompromising attitude towards her. And so would Janet, she thought with sudden amusement: there were times nowadays when she was positively skittish.

  He took her unawares therefore on his next appearance when he put forward a proposal, to which he had obviously given considerable thought, and which was presented with much delicate celtic circumvention to preserve his own deeply rooted sense of what was a fitting distance between them. Alice Tremorne was given to understand that it might be a very good idea if he were to spend his leave restoring the coach house. Admittedly he wasn’t a carpenter or a bricklayer but it was possible that he could overcome this handicap, and he knew a chippy chap who was the great one for fixing things and would know where to lay hands on some timber and tools. “Some things are better done through the likes of him,” he said with a vagueness that she thought it better not to question.

  She was delighted. Providence had smiled upon her again, and this time the alligator bag would see to it that the smile remained, for surely, she reasoned to herself, this was a business proposition? Already she was organizing the details in her mind, and out they came now in a fulsome rush: Janet would turn the Yellow Bedroom into a bed sitting-room for Mr. MacLean’s leave — it was such a sunny room, and he would be very comfortable there — and of course it must be a proper financial arrangement with the proper going wage. . . . On she went without interruption until suddenly she became aware of a coolness in the atmosphere. Bel Ria, sitting beside her, laid the weather vanes of his ears back and looked covertly around.

  When MacLean spoke, his voice was very cold indeed. There would be no financial arrangement; he would be doing it because he chose to do it. There would be no bed-sitting-room in the house, however yellow, however comfortable. The harness room was still weatherproof, there was water from the pump there, a fireplace to cook by — “and the lavatory still works,” he finished with steely finality. If Mistress Tremorne would supply a camp bed and a few cooking utensils, that would be all he would be needing.

  But Mistress Tremorne could not and would not countenance such a one-sided makeshift arrangement. They set to, hammer and tongs, into an argument closely followed by the worried ears and eyes of Bel Ria between them. At the height of it he suddenly yawned hugely, rose, stretched and departed downstairs to Janet, leaving behind a disconcerted lull in the battle.

  Unexpectedly, Alice Tremorne was seized with a witchlike cackling of laughter. “He’s right,” she managed to say at last. “We are being very boring indeed — I give in! Now will you give in over your idea of crouching over a grate with a frying pan and do me one more favor — accept ou
r hospitality for meals?”

  MacLean could make concessions too. He accepted gracefully, even managing to restore Mrs. Tremorne to the position of benefactor.

  “It’s the grand holiday you will be giving me,” he said. “Board and lodging and recreation — what more could I want? I had nowhere else to go anyway — except perhaps to Scotland, to sort things out with Donald Sinclair —”

  The words hung between them. Alice Tremorne interpreted correctly. “That can wait,” she said flatly. “It will wait forever as far as I am concerned. But the coach house needs sorting out now before the winter, doesn’t it? And, after all, I am a very old lady with no one to turn to for help with it, aren’t I?”

  She managed to sound tremulous and pathetic.

  “Aye,” said MacLean, enigmatically as ever. He patted Bel Ria, something she had never seen him do before, and nodded cheerfully enough as he departed, but his eyes looked troubled.

  Mrs. Tremorne watched him go with the stirrings of real affection. Already she was planning that she would feed him like a fighting cock during his stay, even if it meant exploring the murkier depths of the black market, for apart from that being the only way she could repay him, he looked as though he needed building-up. He was far too thin, and often seemed tired and strained. Perhaps it was because of that terrible scar on his head. Somehow she must break down his reserve and get him to talk about the days of the destroyer and get him to fill in the past. She plotted happily.

  He came with an ecstatically returning Bel Ria in that glorious portentous autumn of 1943. He settled into the tackroom — finding that Janet had determinedly added her own touches of a carpet, reading light, and even curtains at the windows — and as he took off his uniform in exchange for working rig, he shed all worries and the outside world of war for the little self-contained one of The Cedars.

  The sirens still wailed their nightly dirge across the land to the approaching bombers. Rationing was even tighter, commodities were exhausted and making-do had become an inventive commonplace, but certain hope was abroad now, growing daily stronger as the pressure of the Allies mounted in every theater of war; from North Africa to Russia; from Italy today to Burma tomorrow — to the certain dawn of that day when the great combined strength would leave these shores and return to France for the final reckoning.

  Against this mighty background were set the victories and defeats of The Cedars — and countless other Cedars across the country. The triumphal bonus of a pound of offal against the surrender of the Italian fleet, fireless grates and the tedium of the blackout against the conditions of the Murmansk convoys; the claustrophobia and damp of the air-raid shelter against a midget submarine in a Norwegian fjord — or the restoration of a coach house against the homeless havoc left in the wake of bombers. Yet all the apparently minuscule trivia, the grumblings, the inconsequential pleasures, were woven into the background of the global tapestry of war. Alice Tremorne’s equal indignation with the laundry and Hitler, the quality of sausages and the Emperor of Japan; Janet Carpenter’s pleasure in the underwear potential of half a German parachute; Neil MacLean’s problems with his conscience, roof measurements and blistered palms — all these were there. Even the way a little dog’s coat was shorn to the winds of compromise was a part of the fabric of that time.

  Bel Ria’s reaction to his separate lives brought together virtually under the same roof was unpredictable: he was plainly very put out at first. Although he slept in Alice Tremorne’s bedroom, walked with MacLean across the fields in the evening, and sat between them at meals, during the rest of the day he paid frequent restless visits from one to another and seemed displaced and unable to relax with either, as though the fusion of his dual roles bewildered him. It took him a day or two to adjust to the situation. Or perhaps, his allegiance no longer divided, he felt free to pursue his own ends, for he took to spending more time with the donkey and with Janet — their company undoubtedly restful and undemanding, for neither expected anything of him other than what he was, and Janet was not above a down-to-earth scolding if he left muddy paw prints on the floor or rolled luxuriously on the compost heap. He spent many more hours too on his garden wall vigil, his eyes distant, yet his ears flicking to all movement up and down the road.

  “It’s as though he were watching for someone to come up that road — I used to think it was whoever he belonged to before, but you are here now — and he still waits,” said Mrs. Tremorne one morning. She was sitting in a garden chair by a neat pile of stacked timber, pressed into dating and listing the intact wine bottles which MacLean had excavated from the debris. Yesterday he had found the shoes that had been blown off her feet nearly two and a half years ago; side by side, the toes turned slightly out as their owner had left them, they had come to light under a pile of lathes. Now he paused in his hammering and emptied his mouth of nails.

  “He would lie like that for hours on board too,” he said, “staring at nothing, as though he was sleeping with his eyes open. Hyacinthe used to curl up beside him whiles, and it seemed he never even noticed she was there.”

  Alice Tremorne put down her dusters and produced two bottles of beer and two glasses from her bag like rabbits from a conjurer’s hat. “Tell me about her, Neil,” she said persuasively, eager as a child for the next installment of a story, one of which she could never have enough. “And about Barkis, and the monkey — Luigi, wasn’t it?”

  “Louis,” he said. “Poor wee Louis —” he broke off abruptly, and poured the beer. Plainly he didn’t want to think about the monkey now. “You should’nae be stopping me at my work,” he said with reproving frown.

  “You need a break,” said Alice Tremorne. “Oh, come along now, Neil — tell me about the ship’s cat,” she cajoled.

  So he told her about Hyacinthe, about her majestic ways and six toes to each front paw, her apparent ability to receive and decipher signals with the antennae of her unusually long whiskers so that she never missed a sailing, always managing to get back on board in the nick of time however solicitous the attentions of her current Lothario on shore. “A real ‘pierhead jumper’ she was,” he said.

  And he told her something of that terrible dawn on their way back from Tobruk when two JU 88s swooped out of the rising sun to sink one of their three destroyers and leave Tertian lying low in the water, mortally wounded from two direct hits. Some passing hand had picked up Hyacinthe where she lay in the scuppers with both front legs broken, and dropped her on a stretcher being passed across to the last destroyer alongside. How Hyacinthe had got back to Alexandria with the rest of Tertian’s survivors and had been taken to hospital with them. And how a Surgeon Captain, an orthopedic specialist in civilian life, had set her legs in a plaster jacket that left her head sticking out of one end, and her hindquarters and tail out of the other.

  “Then,” said MacLean, smiling down at Bel Ria, who had forsaken the wall to join them and sat listening as apparently spellbound as Mrs. Tremorne, “then one of the crew bored a hole through the plaster sleeves, just below the paws, to take an axle for two rubber-tired wheels and turned her into a kind of self-propelling trolley. She used to wheel herself around the hospital, still managing to look dignified despite that contrivance, her tail straight up in the air like a flue brush, and everyone signed her cast, even the Surgeon Rear Admiral.”

  She had made a perfect recovery, her fame had swept even further abroad; and then there had been much rivalry about her future, for it seemed that everyone coveted the stately Hyacinthe: the hospital staff put forward a strong claim, there had been a well-laid plot for cat-napping hatched below a cruiser’s decks, and it was even rumored that the C. in C. Mediterranean Fleet had designs upon her. In the end she went to a minelayer.

  “Until that was sunk on the Tobruk run too,” said MacLean. “But yon cat still had plenty of lives. She survived that, swimming like an otter for a float, their SBA told me, and I heard later that she came back to England — in a submarine of all things.”

  “What a
pity she can’t write a book about her experiences,” said Mrs. Tremorne.

  “If she could, I’m thinking that it would be banned,” said MacLean with a pawky smile. “She was a proper sailor with a husband in every port.”

  “And Barkis? You haven’t told me yet what happened to him?” asked Mrs. Tremorne, aware of Bel Ria’s sudden quivering interest as she spoke the name.

  “The bridge received a direct hit,” said MacLean, so tersely that she forebore to ask any further questions.

  He did not tell her then, or ever, of the ghastly shattered shambles that had been the bridge, of the scalding screaming horror of the engine room, or the twisted tangles of metal mangling the bodies of his shipmates. Of Reid. Of Lessing. Or of any of those sixty-eight shipmates who went down with Tertian. Nor did he tell her then of his last sight of Louis that still haunted him in its lonely bravura . . .

  He went off to get a ladder. Mrs. Tremorne was unable to resist the temptation: “Barkis —” she said softly to Bel Ria, “Hyacinthe, Louis —” but almost immediately was filled with shame for his eyes searched hers eagerly as she spoke their names, then he turned and looked back down the garden as though expecting them to materialize. She felt very small. To distract him, she forced herself to take the now increasingly painful walk to the paddock and the donkey.

  “Walkies, my darling,” she said. “Fetch my stick — fetch Missus’s garden stick. We’ll go and see how Fred is.”

  Neil MacLean sawed and hammered and painted the days away, completely absorbed in his work. The first two days, palms blistered, back aching and head throbbing, he had fallen into his camp bed in the tack room almost immediately after supper. Now, brown and fit, free for the first time in months of the headaches which had plagued him since they removed the fragment of metal from his head in the hospital at Alexandria, he did full justice to Mrs. Tremorne’s carefully plotted meals. Armed with the extra rationing points provided for HM Forces on leave, she excelled herself.