by Lorna Gray
I could hear it in the boy’s voice now when he asked above the creak of the valley gate as it was opened and pressed shut, ‘They’re coming back then?’
‘They are,’ I confirmed gently. ‘Or rather, the Colonel is.’
I took Freddy swiftly onwards down the hill because I didn’t know what else to do. True twilight had descended in the time that we had been indoors and the hillside was a picture of warm summer tranquillity. I eyed my companion carefully as we neared the valley bottom. His face was angular in this light; sharp beneath unruly hair. He didn’t seem so much afraid now as resolutely expressionless as we passed beneath the scented dark of the small plantation of pines.
‘Did he say why the Colonel was coming back?’
I noted that Freddy didn’t consider himself one of the Colonel’s subjects. It was left to men like Danny Hannis to pay the squire his due deference. ‘No,’ I said carefully, ‘Captain Langton didn’t say why. He didn’t have much time because the train was being called. I imagine his father wants to come back and check that the harvest is progressing as it should. I do remember that he said something about the barley.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ He said it in that flat way youths have of dismissing something desperately worrying quite as if it didn’t matter at all. Then he said briskly, ‘They’re taking in a late cut of hay at the moment. The corn’s behind because of the late summer.’ It was said in a rush of an apology because he didn’t like to contradict. Then he asked in an altogether brighter way, ‘Do you think we should go and have a look at it?’
This last question was because we had reached the last turn of the track above the turbine house. The brickwork was rendered in crumbling plaster and it shone white before us against the curling black line of the stream. Now that I knew, this tiny hut really was quite unlike a dwelling. It was also unlike any electricity station that I had ever known. The power stations of London were great smoking beasts with towering black pillars for chimneys. This small brick house straddled a neat platform and water made a faint shushing sound somewhere beneath, where it was released following its racing fall through a pipe from a pond high up by the village. Further downstream I could just make out the broader area of the ford and, a short way beyond that, the end wall of my cousin’s cottage shone grubby silver where the trackway rounded the base of the hillside.
‘We can take a little detour to the turbine house to have a look, if you like.’ My agreement was given doubtfully. Then I perceived the fierce concentration in Freddy’s face and wondered if people persisted in asking him questions, probing what he knew, and it was this little inquisition he was presently bracing himself for rather than any particular concern about our recent trespass in that house. Immediately, I found I would like to examine the turbine house very much. ‘I know it would make me sleep more easily if I knew we’d done our bit to check that poor Mr Winstone has really left no sign behind.’
The change in Freddy’s demeanour was instant. It was, I thought, a reassuring sign that the boy’s life did not appear in general to give him much sense of fear but all the same I expended significantly less effort on looking the part of a valiant sleuth as I followed him over the last of the roughened hillside and worked rather harder at staying alert to signs of life.
There was no one here. The hut’s rotten door was locked. The single metal-framed window with its flaking white paint was securely fastened and nothing could be made out through the filthy glass. Concealed within would, I knew, be the neat little turbine and an array of vast batteries that stored the generated power for future use. It was all wonderfully clean and efficient, and also decidedly exclusive.
My voice sounded loud in the hush of a sleeping valley. ‘Don’t the villagers mind that their houses stay dark while all this awaits someone’s return to the Manor?’
‘Not really. It’s very old. It’s always been like this.’ Freddy seemed surprised by my question, which in turn surprised me. It seemed an odd mixture that he should dislike the Colonel and his family and yet apparently easily accept this. Freddy wasn’t set to be a revolutionary. He was just a boy who was very afraid that the Colonel’s return brought the threat of fresh harm to his tall and caring Matthew Croft.
We were peering for footprints in the baked mud of the bank above the stream. There was nothing there but the neat little hoof prints of thirsty sheep, at least nothing that we could see by starlight. There was nothing here to shake the overriding sense of my own care for this boy. I found that I was saying clumsily, ‘Mr Croft didn’t kill him, did he? Didn’t cause the son’s death, I mean?’
I shouldn’t have said it. I had only meant to establish the limit of the bad feeling between the Langton family and the other man before adding something reassuring, but the boy beside me, naturally enough, completely misunderstood my intentions. He was suddenly very ready to be angry.
‘No! Of course not.’ He stood there glowering at me in the night, hands balled into fists by his sides and hair all dishevelled again. This really was something that he was asked all too often. It also, I think, cut far too close to a memory of a near loss of his own.
‘Well then,’ I persevered gently. ‘I really think you needn’t worry any more. From the way Captain Langton reacted when I mentioned Mr Croft by name, it seems to me that the family is just as desperately keen to avoid an encounter with that past as you are. You mustn’t think the Colonel means to create a fuss by coming back, or that his return is designed to bring fresh upset for Mr Croft. Captain Langton was …’ I searched for a sensible way to put it. ‘Well, to be brutally honest, he sounded like a normal human being who’d had a bit of a shock when I mentioned that Mr Croft was helping Mr Winstone. You can believe me, Freddy. Really you can. So don’t be afraid for Mr Croft any more, Freddy, please.’
The boy blinked. I’d surprised him. He hadn’t expected my only objective to be plain reassurance. But he did, I saw with relief, understand it. For a moment, his fierceness had made him seem suddenly very young indeed. Then he abruptly relaxed.
Shyly, like a guilty child after a fit of the rages, he gulped and said quietly, ‘You’re very nice, Miss.’
‘Not really. It’s just the truth.’
‘You hope,’ he retorted, but he was only contradicting me for the sake of form. Then he abruptly abandoned the search of the riverbed and led the way across rough ground towards my cottage.
A drowsy bird twittered in one of the taller trees. It set off a cock pheasant, who set off another, and so on until the warning cry barrelled up and down the valley in a relay from one tree to the next. There were an awful lot of pheasants up there. Their voices mapped the twists and turns of the valley far beyond the point where it curved away into the smothering oblivion of darkness.
It made me think again that I really ought to walk Freddy home. I said as much and he sniggered with that boyish confidence that never fails to charm. ‘It would pose a bit of a problem though, wouldn’t it, Miss? We’d be up all night walking each other back and forth.’
We were at my garden gate. I set a hand on the weathered wood and tipped my head thoughtfully at him. ‘You don’t seem very nervous.’
I saw him shrug with hands in pockets. His attention was on a pebble he was turning underfoot. Tangled hair was falling over his brow as he said, ‘You said yourself that the fellow brought Mr Winstone home before he met you and bolted. There’s not much point in being afraid of a man like that. He probably didn’t mean to hurt Mr Winstone anyway. He’s probably just a vagrant who came back from the war a bit strange and Mr Winstone caught him unawares.’
‘You think it was one of Mrs Abbey’s squatters?’
The boy’s gaze lifted. ‘Well,’ he said simply. ‘No one who knows Mr Winstone would do it, so it must have been. Goodnight, Miss.’
And on that practical piece of reasoning, he left me and loped complacently off into the gloom. I walked rather less energetically into my cousin’s house and bolted the door. It was, I thought, one thing to be giv
ing reassurance to a frightened youth about the way Captain Langton had spoken of Matthew Croft, but it didn’t do much for my own worries about letting the boy go. Responsibility always did take the form in me of a vivid awareness of the present set against all the things I should have done before but hadn’t. It was complicated marriage between duty and an enduring feeling of guilt that stemmed from all those childhood moments that had long passed and the knowledge that there would never again be a chance to repay what I owed to those people, so I’d better act well now.
But committed as I was to the idea of playing a fuller part these days, it must be said that helplessness was sometimes still preferable to the occasional experience I have had of the other end of the spectrum; the sheer chill of sometimes acting calmly where care and duty had united to override every other serious principle. Those were the moments that brought me into an acquaintance with the dark things in this world that I would otherwise have quite cheerfully ignored, and I hated them.
They made me wish I could run away. They saddened me. The idea that this life was placing me in the company of conflict filled me with a sense of hopelessness for the future and an urge to seek peace elsewhere. It was the principal motive for this visit to my cousin’s house, after all. Only now I had the memory of the other responsibility that had met me today; the one that had led me to pick up an old man from his path and brought me into an encounter with the long list of other worries that went with this place. So at this moment I was contemplating leaving this place again tomorrow and walking the two miles to the bus stop with a view to riding into Gloucester and joining my cousin, as if peace might be found there instead.
The single thing that checked me was my other fear; the one where I am afraid I will discover a few years from now that instead of finding the tranquillity I crave, I’ve actually developed a terrible habit of dramatising the more ordinary parts of life and fleeing from them for absolutely no good reason at all. So really I had no intention of going anywhere.
Except, of course, to bed and the hope that tomorrow would be an easier day.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, I also have a habit of falling into naïve optimism, and in this instance the lesson came in the form of a light knock upon the front door at about eleven o’clock as I prepared to go upstairs at last.
My visitor was Mrs Abbey and I’m afraid to say that for a brief childish moment I was tempted to feign deafness and leave her out there. But then maturity or responsibility or pure idle curiosity or whatever it was dictated that I opened the door and let her in.
As first entrances went, hers wasn’t favourable. The first thing she did as she stepped in a slinking manner out of the dark and along the cramped hallway was to eye the proliferation of oriental vases on the narrow shelf that snaked away at head height into the kitchen and remark, ‘I see Miss Jones hasn’t yet brought herself to clear away the old lady’s ugly knickknacks.’
They were very ugly and it was, I realised then, absolutely no wonder that I’d been running a long argument with the past and loneliness tonight. These feelings dwelt here in this house. Each of the rooms in this cottage was consumed by the fuss and clutter of a dead person’s tastes. In the hallway, my aunt’s commemorative plates joined a flight of ducks to soar away up the stairs. In the tiny sitting room, fading cross-stitch samplers competed for space with Victorian day beds and fragments of broderie anglaise. Upstairs, in the room designated to be my bedroom, there was just enough space between the display of thimbles and the miniature hazel hurdles for my suitcase and the bed. I’ve never met anyone before or since who could compete with the scale of Aunt Edna’s commitment to traditional crafts. All the time that I’d been working myself up towards going to bed, I’d struggled to convince myself that her shade wasn’t watching from the collection of shadows on the coat rack. She’d died six months ago and in hospital rather than here, but I wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t the sort to indulge in a spot of haunting all the same.
Suddenly, in an unexpected way, Mrs Abbey’s bluntness made me like her. It made me lead the way down the short step into the kitchen and I should probably explain why my cousin Phyllis wasn’t presently in it herself. The explanation for her sudden trip to the city of Gloucester had been left for me on the front step in the form of a note dated yesterday with instructions on where to find the key. Cousin Phyllis was trapped in hospital by the inconvenience – her words not mine – of a broken wrist. A friend of hers had scrawled a postscript upon the envelope with the information that the doctor was intending to keep Phyllis for a day or two yet and that this friend would drop by at some point to see that I was managing.
I thought for a moment that Mrs Abbey was the author of this postscript and that was why she was here. I even had the horrible suspicion that this woman was actually here now to break the news that my cousin’s bicycle accident hadn’t been an accident at all, and I had to add another act of violence to the day’s tally.
But she didn’t. She had nothing to say on the subject at all. She was far too busy proving that she was at least a little bit of a genuine gossip because she was enjoying the horror of the attack on Mr Winstone and the inconvenience of Eddington being half a mile on from here and the irritation that certain self-important gentlemen didn’t consider it necessary to drop a woman home.
‘Did you help them ferry Mr Winstone to the doctor after all?’ My bewilderment wasn’t easy to hide.
Eyebrows lifted. In the greasy light of the oil lamp on my cousin’s kitchen table, her hair looked more frayed about the edges than it had been before. The yellow glow was casting her cheekbones into strong relief and it made the shadows under her eyes stronger. She looked tired. But no weariness could affect her presence. She was, as I have said, rather tall and immaculately clad in a navy skirt and jacket, and she had a jaw that implied considerable strength of will and carried its own kind of beauty. There was, I’d noticed, something about the confidence of women of that age – all over thirty – who knew these days exactly what they were capable of and wore it as easily as a dash of lipstick.
Mrs Abbey’s mouth only formed a little smirk as she conceded, ‘If I’d gone with them on their little jolly to see the doctor, they’d have insisted on driving me straight home and I’d have been safely tucked up under the sheets by now instead of bothering you on your doorstep. No, the truth is I’m here because it’s getting horribly late and it’s still a long way home and I’ve done something rather foolish.’
The smirk eased to show a brief gleam of teeth.
I repeated blankly, ‘Foolish?’
She leaned in to confide dramatically, ‘I went to where it had happened and to see if this vagrant had left any signs behind.’
Ah. She wanted to discuss her squatters again. I disarmed her as best I could. ‘It’s not foolish at all. Freddy and I did exactly the same thing. Would you like a cup of tea?’
It was only after I made the offer that I remembered that my cousin’s kitchen was like Mrs Winstone’s house. Here too we were dependent on an ancient cast-iron range for any cooking. My parents’ home in Putney had running water, gas and electricity laid on. This kitchen had a big stone sink without taps, a tiny window that looked out onto the privy and the single luxury of a full jug of water on the sideboard waiting to be used. Unfortunately, I hadn’t lit the beast of a range yet and it was going to require a minor war to get it going. Then Mrs Abbey chose that moment to break the latest shocking news of the evening. She actually laughed at my offer and said, ‘No tea for me, thank you. I know where you get your water.’ Then, seeing my face, added, ‘You did know it came from the stream, didn’t you?’
I’d been drinking from that jug all afternoon. While I was hastily resolving to boil the water very thoroughly from now on, Mrs Abbey drew out a seat at my cousin’s tiny table.
The kitchen was whitewashed on both walls and ceiling and the clean austerity of the room was a direct contradiction of the clutter that swamped the rest of the house. I moved to the si
deboard and propped myself there. Now that I’d let this woman into my home and gone through the brief flutter of companionship I had time to wonder why she was here at all. I prepared to let the silence stretch. I was beaten by Mrs Abbey’s sly sideways look and murmur of, ‘How did you get along with Freddy?’
Her manner puzzled me. It was the sort of tone a woman might use while probing an illicit liaison, only this boy was barely fifteen. I said helplessly, ‘He seems very nice.’
‘Didn’t you find him a little simple, poor boy?’
This was what she was probing. ‘No.’
‘I suppose you didn’t know him before, did you? That’s one thing that can be said for Matthew Croft, he’s certainly improved the boy.’
‘Mr Croft isn’t his father, is he? I mean, he’s not Freddy Croft?’
This question amused her. She laughed. ‘He certainly isn’t. Matthew married Mrs Croft in the spring. Or Eleanor Phillips, as was, I should say. And she isn’t his mother either.’
I conveyed my enquiry with a look. The name was not one that had made its way into my cousin’s letters. Which, to be frank, meant my cousin liked her.
Mrs Abbey added cheerfully, ‘Her farm is the one just up the lane from the village. You’ll see her out and about exercising her horses. Or, at least, usually you do but I haven’t seen her ride for a while. Freddy’s helped her with them since he was evacuated here. He’s from London, like you. Although perhaps not quite like you. His former home is presently a flat piece of ground in one of those cleared spots around the East End.’
‘And is yours?’
‘Pardon?’
‘You, me and Freddy; we’re all from London. It’s starting to feel more like home by the minute.’
Mrs Abbey looked askance at my comment. It made me realise what it was about this visit that felt slightly out of kilter with my expectations. She wasn’t here for tea. She wasn’t really here as my cousin’s friend and she certainly wasn’t quite succeeding at becoming mine. That was the point, I realised. The problem here wasn’t so much that I didn’t think that I would like her but that I felt she wasn’t quite letting me know her. I might have decided that I thought she was wrong for sifting through so many subjects just as soon as she entered the house but they were all shifting so rapidly from genuine humour into sharp edges that I still couldn’t say that even these rather harder gossipy kind of comments were truly giving me a clear measure of who she was.